We have recently had two striking cases in evidence. Bishop Alexander Walters, after having rendered valuable service to the cause as an educator and minister in Kentucky, California, and Tennessee, became the ranking bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. He then decided that his people had been so long duped by the grafters and tricksters masquerading as the successors of Lincoln and Grant, that he would use his influence to have the Negroes divide their vote by supporting Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Dr. J. Milton Waldron, an influential Baptist minister of Washington, feeling that it would mean a new day for the Negro to have this democratic college president of many promises elevated to the headship of the nation by the aid of the Negro vote, did likewise. Disappointed in the end, however, by the hypocrisy of Wilson, who, in his heart hated Negroes, these churchmen saw themselves painfully humiliated among their people, who, in return for the large number of votes which they gave Wilson, received nothing but segregation in the civil service, elimination from public office, and conscription to do forced labor in the World War, while he was promising that the Negroes should have justice and have it abundantly. [Illustration: BISHOP ALEXANDER WALTERS] The Negro churchmen of to-day realize, as most leaders of the race do, that the hope of the blacks lies not in politics from without but in race uplift from within in the form of social amelioration and economic development. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are interested in the Negro except so far as the race may be used to enable them to get into office. Their platform promises have been not something to stand on but to get into office on. This does not in any sense, however, mean that the Negro minister has lost interest in public matters of concern to every citizen, but rather that he has learned the possibilities in the political world. He will in no sense withdraw from the contest in behalf of the rights of his people. His method of attack will be different. Carrying out this reconstructed policy for the rehabilitation of the race, the Negro minister, like a majority of the thinking members of this group to-day, will welcome the assistance and cooperation of the white man, but will not suffer himself to be used as a tool in connection with forces from without the circles of the race, pretending to be interested in the solution of its problems. FOOTNOTES