The Negro Student and World Revolution

Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business. These words spoken by the twelve-year-old Jesus as he sat among the doctors in the temple have always impressed me as being the most ringing challenge to youth expressed in our tradition. Jesus lived in an age of revolution. With the intuition of genius, he sensed long before his elders the need of great change in the philosophical and moral concepts of his people. Though noble in many respects, Judaism could not conceive of the great leveling principle of the common brotherhood of all mankind. Jesus the revolutionary went to the cross a martyr to this principle, and through his death brought about the greatest transformation in world thought yet achieved in our civilization. I wish to point out that it was not a grey-haired philosopher who wrought this world change. Jesus was still a young man when hemet his death at the hands of the mob on Calvary. The history of mankind moves in alternate periods of quiet and turmoil. For long stretches of time man is allowed an interval, as it were, to think and plot and plan for the future; and then comes a period of upheaval, of storm and stress, and like the new cone on a volcano after an eruption, a new set of ideas, a new set of values is added to man's ever-increasing stature. Christ's age was such an age

Political science · Sociology · Race, History, and American Society