less than twenty-five years ago a conference of friends of the
Negro could meet at Lake Mohonk to discuss his problems
without a single Negro present. And even later than that,
great magazines could publish symposiums on the “Negro"
problem without thinking of inviting a single Negro to participate. Again, a revolution is happening under our eyes with
regard to lynching. For forty years, not less than a Negro a
week and sometimes as many as five a week have been lynched
in order to enforce race inferiority by terrorism. Suddenly
this number in 1923 was cut in half and it looks as though the
record of 1924 was going to be not more than one Negro
lynched each month and all this was due primarily to the
tremendous onslaught of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People against lynching and their
broad-casting of the facts.
Finally and just as important is the new national policy as to immigration, born of war. This policy is seemingly a tremendous triumph of the "Nordics” and not only cuts down the foreign immigration to the United States from 1,000,000 a year to 160,000, but also seeks to exclude the Latins and Jews and openly to insult Asiatics. Now despite the inhumanity of this, American Negroes are silently elated at this policy. As long as the northern lords of industry could import cheap, white labor from Europe they could encourage the color line in industry and leave the Negroes as peons and serfs at the mercy of the white South. But to-day with the cutting down of foreign immigration the Negro becomes the best source of cheap labor for the industries of the white land. The bidding for his services gives him a tremendous sword to wield against the Bourbon South and by means of wholesale migration he is wielding it. But note again the extraordinary bed fellows involved in this paradox; Negro laborers, white capitalists and "Nordic" fanatics against Latin Europe, Southern task masters, labor unions, the Jews and Japanese!
Led by American Negroes, the Negroes of the world are reaching out hands toward each other to know, to sympathize, to inquire. There are few countries without their few Negroes, few great cities without its groups, and thus with this
