Dr. Johnson: I have been trying to analyze those qualities that seem to me to constitute stature.
We have concluded that they are at least among these: most persons who attain to greatness can boast at least family status, as a beginning, or a tradition of education which permits an even start with the world: or the advantage of economic position, or of class, or a race favored by circumstances inherent in that status.
The important factor to me seems to rest in the fact that you had none of these at the beginning – none of these advantages – but, instead you had every conspicuous disadvantage upon which our modern society has placed a valuation.
In the first place, sex is a disadvantage, although not entirely so. There has been historically an advantage in mixed blood, and you represent an unmixed ancestry, like a large majority of the submerged Negro population. You came from a part of the country steeped in general and mass backwardness from which emergence is especially difficult. There was no advantage of wealth; there was no tradition of education nor of any important degree of participation in what we are pleased to call our American civilization.
