Self-Respect as a Factor in Racial Advancement

OHN SMITH was a Pullman porter: but he was also more than that. He was an undergraduate in a small Negro college, and his work during the summer months was for the purpose of earning enough money to go back to school in the fall. Back on that little campus he was known and respected as a keen student, as one of the most brilliant members of the advanced classes in Mathematics and kindred subjects. On the Pullman car, however, he was George; his identity as a student, his precious place in the scholastic world, his very selfhood was swallowed up in the undiscriminating calls for ice water and other petty services demanded by passengers. They saw in him only a porter, and not the budding mathematical genius whose intellectual capabilities were the admiration of his college. Such a state of affairs was, of course, intolerable. So John hit upon a device which, doubtless, amused some of his passengers, while it may have confirmed the opinions of others regarding the inveterate instinct of all Negroes to show off. He took with him on every journey thereafter a well worn text-book on the Calculus, and whenever a leisure moment presented itself, John was to be seen delving into its mysteries in the most conspicuous manner possible. And when a passenger called for him with some trivial request, John would leave the book with the regretful air of a mother tearing herself away from a first-born child. The instance of John Smith could have no significance for students of human nature, did we not sense the deep necessity for some such adjustment to his r6le as porter which prompted him to adopt such a means of preserving his better self in the face of difficulties. John Smith the porter was none the less John Smith of the

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