lishment of prestige to things Negro. As a fact, he has merely
had the clairvoyance to place himself at the head of a docile
sector of a whole population which, in different degrees, has
been expressing an indefinable restlessness and broadening of
spirit. The Garvey movement itself is an exaggeration of this
current mood which attempts to reduce these vague longings to
concrete symbols of faith. In this great sweep of the Negro
population are comprehended the awkward gestures of the
awakening black peasantry, the new desire of Negroes for an
independent status, the revolt against a culture which has but
partially (and again unevenly) digested the Negro masses
the black peasants least of all. It finds a middle ground in the
feelings of kinship with all oppressed dark peoples, as articulated so forcefully by the Negro press, and takes, perhaps, its
highest expression in the objectives of the Pan-African Congress.
New emotions accompany these new objectives. Where there is ferment and unrest, there is change. Old traditions are being shaken and rooted up by the percussion of new ideas. In this the year of our Lord, 1925, extending across the entire country are seventeen cities in violent agitation over Negro residence areas, and where once there was acquiescence, silent or ineffectually grumbly, there are now in evidence new convictions which more often prompt to resistance. It is this spirit, aided by increased living standards and refined tastes, that has resulted in actual housing clashes, the most notorious of which have been occurring in Detroit, Michigan, where, with a Negro population increase of more than 500 per cent in the past ten years, this new resistance has clashed with the spirit of the South, likewise drawn there by the same economic forces luring and pushing the Negroes. This same spirit was evidenced in the serious racial clashes which flared up in a dozen cities after the first huge migration of Negroes northward, and which took a sad toll in lives. Claude McKay, the young Negro poet, caught the mood of the new Negro in this, and molded it into fiery verse which Negro newspapers copied and recopied:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs,
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot
