* * * * *

Remembering the multitude of the Croix de Guerre and citations on the breasts of the returning Negro officers and the Distinguished Service Crosses to boot, the Negro officer is smiling, not discouraged with himself and is still carrying on for the flag, the country where he was born and where the bones of his fathers are buried, and for the uplift and leadership of his people for a more glorious Americanism.

History tells us that on the continent of America that Toussaint L’Ouverture, who with a leadership that no man ever surpassed and who routed the best troops of Napoleon Bonaparte, was a pure Negro and a slave until after fifty years old.

Major Martin R. Delaney was a pure Negro, and many others that can be mentioned were pure Negroes.

Ex-parte judgments will not go in the future history, for the black man will not only act his history but he will write it, and be it said that he knows history methods, and that with him they are not those which come from the heat of prejudice and a direct and concerted attempt to discredit any group of American people.

Unpatriotic and unwarranted statements do no good and lull the country to sleep, and throw it off its guard while the effects of these statements are causing just rankling in the breasts of the Negro people who have had a New Vision.

The Negro officers know the psychology of their own race and also of the white race; but it is to be feared the latter will never know the mind and motive forces of the Negro, if he imagines that his group has not had a new birth in America, whose language it speaks, whose thought it thinks for its own betterment, and whose ideals, both social, political, and economic it emulates.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

The new negro and the new America

“The old order
Changeth, yielding place to new.” 
Through the
Arbitrament of war, behold a new and better America!
a new and girded Negro! 
“The watches
Of the night have passed! 
“The watches
Of the day begin!”

Out of war’s crucible new nations emerge.  New ideas seize mankind and if the conflict has been a just one, waged for exalted ideals and imperishable principles and not alone for mere national security and integrity, a new character, a broader national vision is formed.

Such was the result of the early wars for democracy.  The seeds of universal freedom once sown, finally ripened not alone to the unshackling of a race, but to the fecundity and birth of a spirit that moved all nations and peoples to seek an enlarged liberty.  The finger of disintegration and change is never still; is always on the move; always the old order is passing; always the new, although unseen of man, is coming on.  And so it is, that nations are still in the throes of reconstruction after the great war.  That it was the greatest and most terrible of all wars, increases the difficulties incident to the establishment of the new order, precedent to a restoration of tranquil conditions.