The question of color, especially in this country, operates to hide the graver questions of the self. That is precisely why what we like to call “the Negro problem” is so tenacious in American life, and so dangerous….The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours.
