THE NEGRO PIONEERS
Paul U. Kellogg
In Vandemark's Folly and other of his novels. Herbert Quick interpreted the settlement of the Mississippi basin. He gave us its valor and epic qualities. But in that series of remarkable biographical sketches which were cut short by his death, he lamented the cultural wastage of American pioneering. He laid a wreath on the unknown graves of the artists, poets, singers, the talented of youth, who were submerged in the westward trek of peoples on the new continent as, in the course of two hundred and fifty years, they hewed their way through the forests and at last came out on the open prairie. In the northward movement of the Negroes in the last ten years, we have another folk migration which in human significance can be compared only with this pushing back of the Western frontier in the first half of the last century or with the waves of immigration which have swept in from overseas in the last half. Indeed, though numerically far smaller than either of these, this folk movement is unique. For this time we have a people singing as they come—breaking through to cultural expression and economic freedom together.
In our generation the children and grandchildren of the settlers of the Middle West have uprooted themselves as their sires did, but to-day their faces are turned cityward. In this new urban shift, the Negro is sharing, but so swiftly and with such a peculiar quickening as he pours for the first time into this new terrain of American economic and community life, that for him it is more than a migration, it is a rebirth. The full significance of this belated sharing in the American tradi--
