The American nation has thrown its terrible force, its combined spiritual and material energies into an awful war. It is easily and by far the most colossal enterprise of slaughter and destruction in the long tragic history of class and national strivings and the inevitable international chaos into which they issue. Our military, our political, and even our cultural leadership have named it total warfare, and they are doing a pretty good job at giving true substance to a frightful name. In a furious bloody fight, the nation, like the individual, overcomes its usual artificial inhibitions, casting aside its ordinary superficial coverings-up, and brings into full view its innermost character. For, at its best, war is a product and instrument of the most elemental human passions, and depends upon aggravated greeds and intensified hates for anything like a successful execution. It turns out, therefore, that, in connection with and aside from immediate issues involved in the conflict, the exposed nation's character affords a remarkable opportunity for analysis-nay, for diagnosis -and thus for indispensable surgery and fundamental cure. Certainly the most unhealthy aspects of American character, and American civilization are embodied in the normal peacetime treatment accorded its large, weak, long-suffering Negro population. The indignities to which these hapless thirteen or fourteen million native-born citizens are subjected every day of their lives and in their every contact with white Americans have become so institutionalized and thus taken so universally as matter-of-course that even crusading white Americans never fully discover them. Fired with the zeal for righting human wrong, they blindly pass them by, speeding into far off unknown lands and to strange peoples. Those of my generation were young men in the first World War; we had already lived through two decades of Southern racial proscription, racial humiliation: indeed, the entire span of our childhood and youth; we suffered all the disillusionments which the war itself yielded, and the pangs of idleness and want of a long hard depression; and now just in our midor late-forties, the world has had four years of World War II. It has thus become our sad lot to discover how really badly off the American Negro is. But it is also our unique privilege, in the light of revelations yielded in our generation by the two most awful wars in human history, to work for real and lasting remedies to a deadly cancer in American life and civilization. For, as a high ranking Negro military official recently put it, the war against slavery in any form is a phase of the global war, and if America defeats the enemy on the battlefield, and yet is defeated in the high