Negro Digest - Freedom Archives

For Our People - Everywhere
"By far the greatest and most significant thing that is happening in
the World today is a movement on foot for giving the benefits of
civilization to that huge majority of the human race that has paid
for civilization, without sharing in its benefits . . ." (Arnold Toytabee)
". . . most American Negroes, even those of intelligence and courage,
do not fully realize that they are being bribed to trade equal
status in the United States for the slavery of the majority of men .
When this is clear, especially to the black youth, the race must be
aroused to thought and action and will see that the price asked for
their cooperation is far higher than need be paid . . ." (W . E. B .
Du Boi,s)
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NE OF THE most insistent
themes in the
literature of black
America is the attempt
to articulate our
awareness of the presence of a certain
dividedness in our deepest
beings, an inner tension which
W . E . B . Du Bois referred to as a
twoness of spirit and soul .
While all Americans (even those
who were here when the others
came half a millennia ago ) are people
of a broken past, nowhere is the
tension so often obvious as within
the Afro-American community . We
NEGRO DIGEST March 1968
BY VINCENT HARDING
are the largest single segment of the
nation which holds within itself
both East and West, both Africa
and America, both developed and
developing societies . For many of
us the tension has been so unbearably
painful that we have collapsed
it on one or the other side . Until
recently, it was more often the
Western, developed side which triumphed
. Now, of course, there
moves among us a renewed consciousness
of our non-Westernness,
and in the ghettos of the land one
easily senses that many black men
are seeking to build and celebrate
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