ABSTRACT
Through history, the powers of single black men flash like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge of his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood. The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist. It was the ideal of "book-learning"; born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters of the white man. The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home.
