The teaching of Negro history will serve the two-fold purpose of informing the white man and inspiring the Negro. The untoward circumstances under which the Negro lives make the teaching of his history imperatively necessary. When the founders of this government brought forth a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, many thought that the Negro was not regarded as a man. Thomas Jefferson himself, the writer of that document, held the Negro as a slave. The Negro was regarded as mere property, as a mere beast of burden. It required four years of bloody war to transform him from the position of a thing and place him in the ranks of men with a mere chance to struggle for actual democracy. These circumstances have caused one of the most intricate problems, the race problem. They have placed the American Negro in a category by himself. They have brought about the peculiar situation of a nation within a nation. The teaching of Negro history would contribute much to the solution of this complicated race problem. The solution of any problem depends upon an adequate understanding of it. The most illuminating approach to the race problem is the historical approach. The white man of this country must be supplied with the real facts pertaining to the Negro. If not, all of his generalizations will be mere verbiage based upon tradition inspired by prejudice. To prevent a distorted social perspective and to develop a wider community consciousness, the white man should read history from the Negro's point of view. For more than four centuries the Negro has been brought into contact with the European white man. For the most part the Teutonic stocks have regarded the Negro as a negative factor in history. The Latin and Slavic races have been more kindly disposed toward him. They have been disposed to give honor to whom honor is due regardless of race or color. To them color has been an incident of birth, not a badge of inferiority. In the annals of Russia Alexander Pushkin is recognized as her national poet. France considered Toussaint L'Ouverture, one of the most commanding figures of any age, a conspicuous example of the possibilities of the pure-blooded Negro. She recognized Alexander Dumas as her most distinguished romancer. Today she places this mantle upon the shoulders of René Maran. The white people of the United States consider their race to be men of a superior breed and have ignored the Negro in recording European and American history. In their desire to substantiate the theory of the superiority of the white man and the inferiority of the Negro, they have failed to publish or suppressed the truth about the achievements of the Negro. They have looked for nothing praiseworthy in him; they have widely proclaimed his faults and failures. Well did Macaulay say: