For this reason, the advance guard of the Negro people–the 8,000,000 people of Negro blood in the United States of America– must soon come to realize that if they are to take their just place in the van of Pan-Negroism, then their destiny is not absorption by the white Americans.  That if in America it is to be proven for the first time in the modern world that not only Negroes are capable of evolving individual men like Toussaint, the Saviour, but are a nation stored with wonderful possibilities of culture, then their destiny is not a servile imitation of Anglo-Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow Negro ideals.

It may, however, be objected here that the situation of our race in America renders this attitude impossible; that our sole hope of salvation lies in our being able to lose our race identity in the commingled blood of the nation; and that any other course would merely increase the friction of races which we call race prejudice, and against which we have so long and so earnestly fought.

Here, then, is the dilemma, and it is a puzzling one, I admit.  No Negro who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these cross-roads; has failed to ask himself at some time:  What, after all, am I?  Am I an American or am I a Negro?  Can I be both?  Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American?  If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America?  Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American?  Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would?

It is such incessant self-questioning and the hesitation that arises from it, that is making the present period a time of vacillation and contradiction for the American Negro; combined race action is stifled, race responsibility is shirked, race enterprises languish, and the best blood, the best talent, the best energy of the Negro people cannot be marshalled to do the bidding of the race.  They stand back to make room for every rascal and demagogue who chooses to cloak his selfish deviltry under the veil of race pride.

Is this right?  Is it rational?  Is it good policy?  Have we in America a distinct mission as a race–a distinct sphere of action and an opportunity for race development, or is self-obliteration the highest end to which Negro blood dare aspire?