They still have some money, and they have needs to supply. They must begin immediately to pool their earnings and organize industries to participate in supplying social and economic demands.
The strongest bank in the United States will last only so long as the people will have sufficient confidence in it to keep their money there.
In fact, the confidence of the people is worth more than money.
And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race.
Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.
If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.
Let us banish fear.
If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.
The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.
The mere imparting of information is not education.
This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible.
As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.
Negro banks, as a rule, have failed because the people, taught that their own pioneers in business cannot function in this sphere, withdrew their deposits.
In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them.
The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people.