the men of this group been able to work toward
pure scholarship. Taking a slightly different start, The Negro Society
for Historical Research was later organized in New York, and
has succeeded in stimulating the collection from all parts of
the world of books and documents dealing with the Negro.
It has also brought together for the first time co-operatively
in a single society African, West Indian and Afro-American
scholars. Direct offshoots of this same effort are the extensive
private collections of Henry P. Slaughter of Washington, the
Charles D. Martin of Harlem, of Arthur Schomburg
of Brooklyn, and of the late John E. Bruce, who was the enthusiastic and far-seeing pioneer of this movement. Finally
and more recently, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History has extended these efforts into a scientific
research project of great achievement and promise. Under
the direction of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, it has continuously
maintained for nine years the publication of the learned quarterly, The Journal of Negro History, and with the assistance
and recognition of two large educational foundations has maintained research and published valuable monographs in Negro
history. Almost keeping pace with the work of scholarship
has been the effort to popularize the results, and to place before
Negro youth in the schools the true story of race vicissitude,
struggle and accomplishment. So that quite largely now the
ambition of Negro youth can be nourished on its own milk.
Such work is a far cry from the puerile controversy and petty braggadocio with which the effort for race history first started. But a general as well as a racial lesson has been learned. We seem lately to have come at last to realize what the truly scientific attitude requires, and to see that the race issue has been a plague on both our historical houses, and that history cannot be properly written with either bias or counter-bias. The blatant Caucasian racialist with his theories and assumptions of race superiority and dominance has in turn bred his Ethiopian counterpart—the rash and rabid amateur who has glibly tried to prove half of the world's geniuses to have been Negroes and to trace the pedigree of nineteenth century Americans from the Queen of Sheba. But fortunately to-day
