Newspaper Page Text
Campus Mirror
Published During the College Year by the Students of Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia
VOL. XIX FEBRUARY, 1943 NO. 5
Max Yergan
Mr. Max A ergan, Executive Secretary of
the Council on African Affairs, brought to
Spelman College a vivid picture of the plight
of the tens of millions of African natives and
the relationship of their problems to the win
ning of the war, when he spoke at the Ves
pers Service, February 7, in Sisters Chapel.
This was one of a number of visits that
Mr. Yergan has made to our campuses, the
first visit having been made fifteen years ago,
when he was in Atlanta as the guest of Dr.
Hope, who was at that time president of
Morehouse College. He was then home on
furlough from his post in South Africa, where
he operated under the auspices of the Y. M.
C. A. as the only Negro Christian at work
in that part of the African continent.
Before launching his actual message con
cerning our close relationship to the prob
lems of the Africans, Mr. Yergan traced the
beginnings of his interest in those problems,
twenty-five years ago, in a dramatic recital
of a severe illness experienced twenty-five
hundred miles inland from the Indian Ocean
coast, and the lasting effect the despair of
a little native lad, whom he was leaving, had
on all his subsequent plans. The Negroes
of Africa are calling to the Negroes of
America, giving us marching orders in the
deep spiritual sense, Mr. Yergan said; they
are expecting us to help them achieve a fuller
and more abundant life, “the new heaven and
the new earth that the democracies hope to
achieve after this war.' “If I speak of Africa
in terms which may he considered political
or economic," he explained, “these terms
are only used because they point the path to
the spiritual problem of gaining the life
abundant. I nless Africans and Indians col
laborate with the Allies, the Allies stand a
grave chance of losing the war. And if the
war is lost, it means a future darker than
the black past that they have known, for
the more than one hundred sixty million
people of Africa."
There are two ways in which the Negro
American can help his African brethren,
Mr. Yergan advised. In the first place, we
must win the war, using all the power at our
disposal “to wipe away from the earth that
which manifests itself under Hitler." This
winning of the war is a practical need, he
said, as it alone will preserve the opportunity
and the right to continue the struggle for a
more abundant life. He has read the ruthless
Nazi plans concerning post-war Africa, and
therefore earnestly voices the statement of
the Council on African Affairs, of which
Paul Robeson is president, that the more
onerous laws under which Africans live need
to be removed as an immediate, win-the-war
movement. The second way in which we can
help, he continued, has to do with a long-
range view r : a reasonable commitment to the
program in Africa which will free Africans
of the exploiting overlordship under which
they have suffered. We have got to fight
fascism wherever it appears, he said, both at
home and abroad, both in connection w ith the
abolition of the poll tax and abolition of
colonialism. There can be freedom from this
sort of oppression, is his belief, the basis for
which is in the existence of millions of peo-
(Continued on page 6)
Negro History Week
The week in which Lincoln’s birthday oc
curs has been set aside as Negro History
Week. This year a series of chapel speakers
aided in the celebration of Negro History
Week at Spelman College.
Mr. Wallace \ an Jackson, head of the
Atlanta l diversity Library, began the series
with a lecture on achievements of the Negro
in unusual fields of endeavor.
Mr. John Wesley Dobbs, Grand Master of
the Masonic Lodge, and President of the At
lanta Civic and Political League, spoke on
the Negro and civil rights.
Air. B. H. Nelson, of Clark College, dis
cussed Abraham Lincoln and his contribu
tion'- to American democratic traditions.
Lincoln’s formulation of “government of. for,
(Continued on page 3)