American Negroes have risen to high places in the professions, arts, and
letters in the last one hundred years despite a thousand social obstacles.
The role of race in history is rather preliminary than creative. Varied
stocks, entering some locality from diverse directions at divers times,
mingle their blood, traditions, and ways with one another or with the
existing population, like two diverse pools of genes coming together in
sexual reproduction. Such an ethnic mixture may in the course of centuries
produce a new type, even a new people; so Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons,
Jutes, Danes, and Normans fused to produce Englishmen. When the new
type takes form its cultural expressions are unique, and constitute a new
civilization–a new physiognomy, character, language, literature, religion,
morality, and art. It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the
civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic,
and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type. The
Englishman does not so much make English civilization as it makes him; if
he carries it wherever he goes, and dresses for dinner in Timbuktu, it is not
that he is creating his civilization there anew, but that he acknowledges
even there its mastery over his soul. In the long run such differences of
tradition or type yield to the influence of the environment. Northern
peoples take on the characteristics of southern peoples after living for
generations in the tropics, and the grandchildren of peoples coming up from
the leisurely South fall into the quicker tempo of movement and mind
which they find in the North.
Viewed from this point, American civilization is still in the stage of
racial mixture. Between 1700 and 1848 white Americans north of Florida
were mainly Anglo-Saxon, and their literature was a flowering of old
England on New England’s soil. After 1848 the doors of America were
opened to all white stocks; a fresh racial fusion began, which will hardly be
complete for centuries to come. When, out of this mixture, a new
homogeneous type is formed, America may have its own language (as
