Nor does this embrace all of the ragged pattern. Silently
and yet with such steady persistence that it has the aspect of
an utterly distinct movement, the newer spirits are beginning
to free themselves from the slough of that servile feeling
(now happily classified by the psychologists as the “inferiority
complex") inherited from slavery and passed along with virulence for over fifty years. The generation in whom lingered
memories of the painful degradation of slavery could not be
expected to cherish even those pearls of song and poetry born
of suffering. They would be expected to do just as they did:
rule out the Sorrow Songs as the product of ignorant slaves,
taboo dialect as incorrect English, and the priceless folk lore
as the uncultured expression of illiterates,—an utterly conscious
effort to forget the past, and take over, suddenly, the symbols
of that culture which had so long ground their bodies and
spirits in the dirt. The newer voices, at a more comfortable
distance, are beginning to find a new beauty in these heritages,
and new values in their own lives.
Less is heard of the two historic "schools of thought” clashing ceaselessly and loud over the question of industrial and higher education for the Negro. Both schools are, sensibly, now taken for granted as quite necessary. The new questions of the industrial schools are concerned with adjusting their curricula to the new fields of industry in which Negro workers will play an ever mounting rôle, and with expanding their academic and college courses; while the new question of the universities is that of meeting the demand for trained Negroes for business, the professions, and the arts. The level of education has been lifted through the work of both, and the new level, in itself, is taking care of the sentiment about the division.
Thus the new frontier of Negro life is flung out in a jagged, uneven but progressive pattern. For a group historically retarded and not readily assimilated, contact with its surrounding culture breeds quite uneven results. There is no fixed racial level of culture. The lines cut both vertically and horizontally. There are as great differences, with reference to culture, education, sophistication, among Negroes as between the races.
