In terms of enduring values--the kind of values respected wherever scholars gather, in the East no less than in the West--in terms of values that last, and mean something, and excite universal admiration and respect, what has man gained from the history of the Negro race? The answer, alas, “virtually nothing.” From the dawn of civilization to the middle of the twentieth century, the Negro race, as a race, has contributed no more than a few grains of sand to the enduring monuments of mankind. One finds no pleasure in rendering such a judgment; one finds no more than the cold comfort of truth, and even that chilly companion is made the less attractive by the disdain in which this unappealing truth is held. Yet the serious students of the South’s position, like the serious pathologist examining an especially distasteful object, ought not to be deterred. If the South is wrong in this appraisal of the contributions of the Negro race (or “culture,” or “ethnic group”), then evidence of this wrongness should be readily attainable in standard works of reference; such evidence should be convincingly documented, objective in its nature, susceptible of proof by accepted tests of scholarship. Well, then, where is this contrary evidence? What library houses the works of a Nubian Thucydides? Who was the Senegalese Cicero? One plows in vain through the works of a score of apologists. In the volumes of the most sympathetic Negrophile writers, one finds little but conjecture, surmise, vague assertions that thus and so “must have been true.” What are the contributions of the Negro culture to enduring art, or music, or literature, or architecture? To law, jurisprudence, government? To science, invention, mathematics, philosophy? Here was a race, if the horrid word may be used (or a culture or subculture or ethnic group), that lived for thousands of years in effective possession of one of the richest continents on earth. Here were a people who lived by the sea, and never conceived the sail; who dwelled in the midst of fantastic mineral deposits, and contrived no more than the crudest smelting of iron and copper. The Negro developed no written language, not even the poorest hieroglyphics; no poetry; no numerals; not even a calendar that has survived. Even so skilled a defender as Toynbee has to conclude, after a desperate flurry of coughs and sighs, that the Black Race is the only one of the primary races “which has not made a creative contribution to any one of our twenty-one civilizations.” Breasted, who wrote in a more objective time, before fashions of social ideology tended to warp critical judgment, says bluntly that “the Negro peoples of Africa were without any influence on the development of early civilization.”