“Negro leaders” thought that “white Americans did not know of or realize the continuing plight of the Negro,” he wrote in a 1935 essay. “Accordingly, for the last two decades, we have striven by book and periodical, by speech and appeal, by various dramatic methods of agitation, to put the essential facts before the American people. Today there can be no doubt that Americans know the facts; and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved.”
