of the credit system, and help weave in its stead the texture
of a new and more self-reliant rural life, are settlers in a very
real sense. And so are the men and women who, in a great
city district like Harlem, against the pressure of overcrowding
and high rents, against the drag of black exploiters and white,
and the hazards of sickness and precariousness of livelihood,
odds which all of us face in our great city machines, and which
bear down with redoubled force upon youth and childhood—these men and these women, who strand by strand fashion the
fabric of the good life in a city neighborhood, are of the breed
of the old pioneers. They are builders.
Do not mistake me, the land they come to is not all milk and honey. Nor was the way of the frontiersman, or the frontier woman, or the frontier child. Nor were these all cast in heroic or congenial, or even tolerable, molds. But the new order in the Southern countryside, the new order in the Northern city, offers an economic foothold, as did the old clearing. It calls on the spirit of team play, as did the old settlement with its road building and its barn raisings. There is a smack of opportunity and freedom in the air. The very process as bound up in those changes in individual fortune, is instinct with that group consciousness of common adventure, is fresh with the tang of growth and expansion, which the wagon trains carried with them to the West, and which became the theme of our pioneering.
The vocational schools for Negroes in the South have encouraged, among other things, the vigorous spirit of individual initiative which we like to associate with American character. The recoil among Negroes against political suppression and terrorism which has animated much of their leadership of protest in the last thirty years has been kin to our old rebel tradition. But here in this new pioneering, we have the nascent beginnings of that other great mode of social impulse. And we catch its gleam in a newer, more positive and creative leadership of self-expression.
Those of us who trace our blazed ways to the Atlantic Seaboard, to Pilgrim Rock or James River blockhouse or Dutch trading post, can perhaps not realize what it means to a people
