which enriches this volume. There were Negroes who protested against his series of racial types; they clung to the prevailing ideals of beauty and these heads were not beautiful to them. As others were quick to point out, from the picture books they were brought up on as children to the newspaper supplements that reached their homes the Sunday before, they had been encompassed by Nordic conventions. Their imagery had been so long thwarted and warped that they could not grasp the rare service rendered by this Bavarian artist, who came with fresh eyes, who is the first in America to break with sentimentality and caricature and delineate racial types with fidelity, and who is encouraging a group of young Negroes to follow through to mastery the path he has broken.
Mr. Reiss's pastels were shown that month in the Harlem Public Library, and at the instigation of Mrs. McDougald, hundreds of Negro school children passed before them. There they saw plain people depicted, such as they knew on the street, and, also, poets, philosophers, teachers and leaders, who are the spearheads of a racial revival; forerunners, whose work might be passed on to them, men and women treated with a dignity and beauty and potency altogether new. Images they could carry with them through their lives. Their pioneers!
But, though this latest experience of the American Negro is properly a promisefully racial revival, more fundamentally even it is an induction into the heritage of the national tradition, a baptism of the American spirit that slavery cheated him out of, a maturing experience that Reconstruction delayed. Now that materially and spiritually the Negro pioneers, and by his own initiative, shares the common experience of all the others of America's composite stock, his venturing Americanism stakes indisputable claims in the benefits and resources of our democracy.
