measurement but sufficient to make absolute limits
to his possibilities, save in exceptional cases.
And here we stand today. As a normal human
being reacting humanly to human problems the
Negro has never appeared in the fiction or the
science of white writers, with a bare half dozen
exceptions; while to the white southerner who
“knows him best” he is always an idiot or a
monster, and he sees him as such, no matter what
is before his very eyes. And yet, with all this, the
Negro has held the stage. In the South he is
everything. You cannot discuss religion, morals,
politics, social life, science, earth or sky, God or
devil without touching the Negro. It is a perennial and continuous and continual subject of books,
editorials, sermons, lectures and smoking car confabs. In the north and west while seldom in the
center, the Negro is always in the wings waiting
to appear or screaming shrill lines off stage. What
would intellectual America do if she woke some
fine morning to find no “Negro” Problem?
Coming now to the slowly swelling stream of a distinct group literature, by and primarily for the Negro, we enter a realm only partially known to white Americans. First, there come the rich mass of Negro folk lore transplanted from Africa and developed in America. A white writer, Joel Chandler Harris, first popularized “Uncle
