6 Looking back now, I know that the essence of these conflicts was distilled in my own boyhood home. My mother, who certainly would not have phrased it so, or even consciously thought it so, was an individualist. She was also the perfect embodiment of a type of Negro womanhood whose existence is still denied by those who cling to the old abasing habits of thought. Virtuous, educated and noted for her beauty, she lived her short life in a firm belief that the moral exercise of individual initiative, imagination and will was enough to overcome the handicap of a colored skin. I have before me now some lines she wrote, obviously thinking of her sons. And so you are a son of darker hue! Think then that God sees in your face A lesser image of his love and grace— The ills of life all meant for you? What light before you beckoning? The iron will, the open heart and mind, The hope, the wish, the thought refined— These compass points for a true reckoning. These are not a full expression of her thought, for there was enough of the chauvinist and enough of the sense of reality in her to make it clear that in her time, except in the most unusual circumstances, the limits of progress for the Negro were within the Negro world. Yet she spoke with pensive pride of Howard Drew, who had been a great college athlete and who was then a Hartford lawyer with an entirely white clientele; and of Maria Baldwin, the Negro principal of the very estimable Agassiz School in Cambridge, where many Harvard professors sent their children; and of Lillian Evans (Madame Evanti), who sang opera for a season at La Scala; and even (though with less pride, for the theater was still suspect in her mind) of Bert Williams. But my father was different. He took pride in such successes too, but it irritated him that the knowledge of them was not more widespread. He would have used them on the one hand as arguments against the white-superiority theories of Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant and Jerome Dowd, and on the other, as arguments for his own theory that the Negro could and should develop his own American culture. I saw him brought to the verge of tears when the Brown and Stevens Bank—“the richest and safest Negro bank in the world”—failed back in the early 1920’s. And this was not because he lost money in that disastrous collapse—he didn’t—but because that failure cast dark shadows over the prospects of a self-sustaining Negro culture. He saw other shadows many times, but he remained (and now in his eighty-second year remains still in his heart, I think) a race chauvinist. For him there was no incongruity between this and his insistence that his sons go East to a New England college.