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chief responsibility for the school. The vast variety of community conditions revealed points to the potential responsiveness of the Negro. Again and again the reader finds it stated that 'conditions would amaze any old resident who had been absent for four years,' that 'the improvement is so great that no comparison can be made.'"
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AESOP
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING BLACK
The revival of the question of the descent of the author of Aesop's celebrated fables in Henry Holt & Company's recent publication, "The Negro," has brought some interesting newspaper comment. One writer in the New York *Sun* says that Aesop was "of dark complexion with pendant lips." Another replies that his color was "not black" and his features "not ugly" because he had "a radiant mind!" Shades of Darwin! A West African therupon replies: 
"His Physical Characteristics, which have been minutely described by men who had seen him, are not physical characteristics of a man of any European race. 'Flat nose, pendant lips, crisp hair, large abdomen, a long head and dusky complexion' does not accurately describe a white man. That description is very nearly, if not quite, that given by lexicographers of the Negro.
 * * * * * *
"I should say that the early historians who wrote about Aesop were better informed as to what race he belonged to than these modern writers, some of whom read history with their prejudices, and are unwilling to give credit where credit is due. Educated Africans have no doubt as to the race to which Aesop belonged. It is African pure and simple. If Aesop were in the flesh today he could easily pass for a Negro in the United States of America. And your correspondent, I fancy, would hesitate to entertain him socially." 
Mr. Arthur A. Schomburg writes further: 
"It is not 'necessary to turn to legend and romance.' A perusal of 'Torence's Comedies made English by his life with Laurence Echard, 9th edition, London, 1841, says 'as for his person he was of a middle stature, very slender and somewhat of a tawny complexion.' With Aesop having a dark complexion and Torence tawny it cannot be properly claimed that these men born in Africa were white men, and the proof that they were must be more clearly established than that contained in the present editions of emasculated books whose writers have painted every man of distinction suspected of having African blood with a good dose of kalsomine.
"If Prester John was white what will you do with the picture of Negroes shown in Ludolph's 'History of Aethiopia' printed in 1691. The reigning king and Abbas Gregorious who gave Ludolph all material information as shown are unquestionably Negroid. 
"Jose Maria Heredia, the king of sonnets crowned by the French Academy, was a white man but Severiano de Heredia who held high post under the French government, was of Negroid descent and this is amply verified not only by LaRousse, encyclopaedia but by his family, some of whom still survive him. 
"Take, for instance, the case of Alexander Hamilton the unexplained mystery of the American nation, a man who appears to have been born without a mother, yet Gertrude Atherton, in her 'Conquerer,' and in her article in the North American Review for August, 1902, upsets all precedents in romancing with the creation of a family connection and establishing beyond peradventure a fictitious mother for this great man whose real mother, as the saying goes to this day in Nevis, where he was born, was a beautiful octoroon woman who, like many of her kind, remained true to Hamilton and lived as in the cloisters of a convent, so far as the outside world was concerned-alone."
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MISCELLANEOUS
A CORRESPONDENT asked me the other day if I had any doubt that the slow rate at which he succeeded in his particular work was because he was a colored man. My answer is that I have very considerable doubt. I have known first class white men who for many dreary years have had to work here with little or no recognition and who won it ultimately only by the slow dogged perseverance and ability that the case demanded. I have known colored men in the same box. On the other hand I have known and know colored men who are as successful in their spheres almost at once as men could be and that right here. The fact is that some men allow themselves to be obsessed with the idea that because they are colored there is bound to be prejudice against them and then they, of course, see a duppy at every dildo bush. It is all the worse when they have been to the States. They come back imbued with the idea more than ever and if they did not find slights they would look for them. They vent the spleen gathered in the land of the free on the lands of all the sundry here. The sensible  and really able colored man who has a good disposition, as well as gifts, goes right along pegging away just like the white man and by and by people have forgotten whether he is white, black, brown or variegated. He makes good and 'delivers the goods,' and that is all people here want. It is generally the inferior kind of man from who one hears the perpetual bleat about his skin being a bar, etc. I am not implying however, that my correspondent is of that class. I think that he has not done enough well-baked thinking and is a bit hyper-sensitive." - Jamaica (B. W. I.) Times. 
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I ASSERT, and challenge successful refutation, that nowhere on God's earth today is the lot of the black man more irksome and less enviable than in the land of his ancestors and his natural home, Africa, and in South Africa the aggravation of his miseries synchronized with the perfection of union. That union, which was heralded amid a blare of joyful trumpetings and which to the white man meant the accession of strength and blessings which came in the wake of the amalgamation of forces, became to the black man a curse by the white man's determination that for the blacks there shall be a policy not of leveling up, but one of leveling down-i.e., the adoption of the most vicious and repressive measures which obtained in the worst of the erstwhile states, rather than the more liberal ones of the more enlightened ones.
"I am not unaware of the existence in America of a large number of well-meaning people among yours and my races who propose as a panacea for the ills of the Afro-American an African exodus because, forsooth, being the land of his people, a cordial welcome here awaits him and here he would, metaphorically, 'sit under his own vine and figtree.' Theoretically, this is beautiful, and the picture presents a most enchanting view from the distant perspective. It is most alluring and tempting. Nearer approach, however, will speedily dispel the illusion. The unprejudiced observer will readily admit that the treatment of the South African black man is daily becoming worse and the bogie of 'black peril' is set up only as an excuse for his repression.
"For an imaginary or no offense the American mob will rush at one poor helpless black man-aye, and woman, too, as has been oft done, and hurl him or her into eternity without any form of trial. Mais, ici nous avons change tout cela. One solitary white man, as in the case of Lewis of Buluwayo, or one frail white woman, armed with a revolver, is quite sufficient for and is the sole executor at our lynching bee here. And a kindly disposed judge and a sympathetic and kindred jury is always at hand to acquit or to inflict a small fine in a case of unusual ferocity."-F. Z. S. Peregrino, of South Africa, in a letter to Congressman Madden, published in the Buffalo (N. Y.) Express. 
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THERE are other cases where we can compare the NEgro and the Englishman more exactly than in the case just mentioned. Take South Africa, for example.
"Europeans have been there only for two or three generations in any large numbers. They have gone from the highly stimulating climate of Western Europe to the moderately stimulating climate of South Africa. They find themselves face to face with the Zulus, and especially the Basutos, who within a few generations have come from the stimulating regions nearer to the

Transcription Notes:
I used [[Symbol - new thought]] to denote the symbols between thoughts.