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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)