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nevertheless, a dream. For, let us join hands on this mountain as
we may, the battle is elsewhere. It proceeds far from us in the heat
and horror and pain of life itself where all men are betrayed by
greed and guilt and blood-lust and where no one's hands are clean.
Our good will, from which we yet expect such power to transform us,
is thin, passionless, strident: its roots, examined, lead us back to our
forebears, whose assumption it was that the black man, to become
truly human and acceptable, must first become like us. This assump–
tion-once accepted, the Negro in America can only acquiesce in the
obliteration of his own personality, the distortion and debasement of
his
own experience, surrendering to those forces which reduce the
person to anonymity and which make themselves manifest daily all
over the darkening world.
