Through it all the Republican party remains the most corrupt influence among Negro Americans. It buys up by jobs, appointments and gifts those Negroes who in politics should be the free and independent spokesmen of Negro Americans. But worse than this is its private work in which it secretly subsidizes men who pose before the public as independent radicals. These intellectual pimps draw private supplementary incomes from the Republican party to sell out the influence of any movement, church or newspaper with which they are connected. Of the enormity of this mode of procedure and the extent to which it saps the very springs of Negro integrity the average Negro knows nothing. Its blighting, baleful influence is known only to those who have trained ears to hear and trained eyes to see. And now in this election the standards will advance and the cohorts go forward under the simple impulse of the same corrupting influence. But whether the new movement for a Negro party comes to a head or not, the new Negro in America will never amount to anything politically until he enfranchises himself from the Grand Old Party which has made a political joke of him. —July, 1920. 1. The first part of this editorial is reprinted from an article written in 1912. CHAPTER V. THE PROBLEMS OF LEADERSHIP. [In all the tangles of our awakening race consciousness there are perhaps none more knotty than the tangles relating to leadership. Leadership among Negro Americans, as among other people, means the direction of a group’s activities, whether by precept, example or compulsion. But, in our case, there is involved a strikingly new element. Should the leading of our group in any sense be the product of our group’s consciousness or of a consciousness originating from outside that group? What the new Negro thinks on the problem of “outside interference” in the leadership of his group is expressed in the first and sixth editorials of this chapter, one of which appeared in _The Voice_ and the other in _The Negro World_. “A Tender Point” formulates one part of the problem of leadership which is seldom touched upon by Negro Americans who characteristically avoid any public presentation of a thing about which they will talk interminably in private; namely, the claim advanced, explicitly and implicitly, by Negroids of mixed blood to be considered the natural leaders of Negro activities on the ground of some alleged “superiority” inherent in their white blood.