And that thorny prospect brings me to yet another reason for the personal slant of this essay. I do not wish to live with the race problem for the next one hundred years—though of course I shall not live so long. I do not wish to die knowing that my children and theirs to the third generation must live with it. I have known it too long and too intimately already. It has itself been an imperative, channelizing more of my energies than I wished to spare through the narrow gorge of race interest. Yet I have felt myself in no sense a crusader. I have not been uplifted with the compensatory afflatus of the inspired leader. Let me be quite frank. I have done what I have, not because I wanted to, but because, driven by a daemonic force, I had to. The necessity has always been a galling affliction to me and the root of my personal grievance with American life. This should not be hard to understand. Connected with all this, of course, has been a sense of impersonal obligation which I like to think of as growing out of a decent regard for the common welfare. This civic sense has not expressed itself widely in group and racial activities and organizations, for I am not that kind of person. If it is a fault, I am sorry for it. I tried to be that kind of person. At one time or another I have been a member of most of the racial uplift groups, and am still a member of some, and when I was in my early twenties I thought I had taken fire from the mass and that if need be I could exhort and harangue and make public protest with the best of them. But I did not know myself so well then. What I felt was merely the exuberant, youthful need for self-losing identification. It gives me sad amusement to recall that in those days a friend of mine used teasingly to call me “Marcus Garvey”—a name that was the very apotheosis of blatant race chauvinism. But I had no real chance to be blatant—a habit, I suppose, like any other—and no natural inclination. Nor could I really lose myself in the mass. 3