For, while the record of Western settlement in our dealings
with the Indians is a chapter not without black pages which
may be compared with our slave trade, nonetheless it was the
free play of free men on free land that built up the Middle
West; and it was the rapidly mounting weight of men and
means of that hinterland, flung into the conflict by common
faith in an order which meant opportunity for all, which tipped
the scales as between North and South, preserved the Union
and freed the slaves. Lincoln was its man; not its leader
merely, but framed of the bone and marrow of its plain people;
his spirit, the embodiment of frontiersmen and settlers.
And what has this to do with the northward migration of the Negro—or its counterpart, his partnership in agricultural reconstruction in the South? It has more to do than that children and grandchildren of the emancipated slaves enter the gates of the cities with the children and grandchildren of the old frontier. Or even that in this new generation they are fellow adventurers as never before in the inveterate quest of our people for new horizons—on the land and in industry. These things are in themselves of tremendous import. But my point is, that in the pioneering of this new epoch, they are getting into stride with that of the old. By way of the typical American experience, they become for the first time a part of its living tradition.
The great folkway which is America need no longer be a thing abstract, apart from them. The Negro boy, who with his satchel steps off the train in Pittsburgh or Chicago, Detroit or New York, to make his way in what Robert Woods called the city wilderness, may draw at the same springs of inspiration as the boy next him from Wisconsin or Kansas, or that other who, still westward bent, throws in his lot in the valley of some irrigation project in the mountain states.
The same can be said of the Corn Club boys and girls of Georgia or South Carolina, who are building up farm homes with new tools and husbandry in regions which have been held in the mesh of a worn out economy. The Hampton and Tuskegee graduates, the farm demonstrators and co-operators who break that mesh, its tough warp of the one crop and its binding woof
