Movement for a Choral
Larsson, R. Ellsworth
June 19, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 181 education, and the stamping out of mob violence. Southern colleges and universities are offering courses in race studies, providing undergraduates with reliable...
...Twenty years ago the average colored person thought of Africa as a remote elephant jungle inhab- ited by primitive tribes to which he was vaguely and anthropologically linked...
...Labor problems for natives of East and South Africa, the political situation under European control and the administrative policies of the ruling nations in Africa have all been included in the Negro educa-tional program "to understand the white world in its relations to the non-white world...
...I asked a Negro well known for his books--a man of culture, education and versatile gifts, who has spent many mellow and useful years in Latin-American coun- tries-why he did not live permanently abroad...
...He is tremulously aware of himself in such expres-sions as the New Negro, the Negro Renaissance, the Negro's Coming of Age, and Harlem, the Mecca of the Negro World...
...June 19, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 181 education, and the stamping out of mob violence...
...Why did he, who has so much to contribute in creative effort, struggle against prejudices and limiting restric- tions...
...To quote Alain Locke : The Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not...
...Southern colleges and universities are offering courses in race studies, providing undergraduates with reliable information as a background for their own future responsibility in adopting a fair-minded attitude in their relations with the Negro...
...In his new mood he is not exalt~ lng himself---a compensatory measure of spiritual escape adopted by many oppressed classes--but rather he is turning inward for self-analysis and inviting con- structive criticism in preference to sentimental and charitable allowances for weakness...
...He is searching Africa for the roots of his past and exploring primitive cultural expression in music, sculpture and folk-lore...
...For after all, America is my country...
...Since that time several congresses have been called...
...Whatever I can contribute through my work grows out of my own experience as an American of African descent...
...The Pan-African movement has not vet accomplished anything tangible, but it has drawn into a closer bond of common inter- est the I5O,OOO,OOO Negroes in Africa and America whose welfare is affected by selfish government policies...
...The publication of a Negro investi- gation in Haiti first attracted public attention to con-ditions in the tiny island republic under American rule...
...Restless in the full exercise of his political rights at home, the intellectual Negro is acquiring an inter-national outlook...
...There was, to be sure, Liberia, but that tiny dot of black nationalism was no promised land, only a diplomatic berth for an occa- sional American Negro...
...Fortified by his rehabilitated group consciousness, the Negro is shedding some of his traditional humble- ness...
...A bit of wood-carving from Gabon, a bold Bushongo design, a West Coast legend related to the Bre'r Rabbit tales tran-scribed by Joel Chandler Harris, strengthen his con-viction that his genealogical jungle tree has healthy roots in a life-sustaining soil...
...In one of the Spanish-speaking countries or in France he could meet people of his own intellectual calibre and he would not be continually reminded of his color...
...In his new-found racial pride, the Negro is turning with eager interest to his ances-tral continent...
...7ovement for a CAorale No city shall I call my own the winds can blow down and the rains dissolve to leave one standing isolate in wide unfruitful savage lands that show the season and the worm can scrawl a dry sarcasm on the walls of all these cities we have sown-no city the winds can blow down and the rains dissolve to show the gaping ribs of steel beneath the facile flesh of stone-the rooms untenanted except of eyes that watched the burning cities fall (Column and column--cornice and arcade) untenanted except of eyes and echoes-echoes of an endless crying grown and blown down grown again as harvest of such sterile lands as I have known (and the isles drifting to seaward on the seaward swells-dissolved seaward the vagrant isles---the isles drifting to seaward on the swells unraveled by drifting mists as winds unravel vagrant bells) R. ET.LSWORTH LAggSOtr...
...Du Bois was responsible for initiating the first Pan-African Con-gress, which met in Paris in I9I 9, the pioneer effort to bring together representatives of peoples of Afri- can descent in a world conference...
...He has relegated Uncle Tom and the planta- tion mammy to the ash-heap...
...In his own writing he is speaking with growing clarity in the modern idiom...
...He smiled a little sadly and a little wist- fully and said, "I have enjoyed living in those coun-tries, but always as an exile, always with the feeling that one day I would be returning home...
Vol. 10 • June 1929 • No. 7
