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19 The Breath of Agitation Is Life In this 1914 article for the AME Church Review, Fortune reflects on the work of race organizations and the value of agitation. He believes that the “breath of agitation is life” and that it should be advocated, but at the same time he believes that those who are not directly involved in agitation should not be criticized. In this he believes that the work of Booker T. Washington and the National Negro Business League are important and should not be dismissed. The most important issue to Fortune is “race unity.” The Breath of Agitation Is Life —AME Church Review 31, no. 1 (1914): 5–10 The social organism is so constituted that perpetual and uninterrupted agitation of all of its coordinates makes for life of the whole, while stagnation makes for death. So true is this principle that it permeates and dominates spiritual and material force, so that evolution in every direction is worked out by revolution. The human body is the most perfect organism in existence . All of the members of it work in harmony, when they do, to supply the money necessary to buy the food that makes the blood that fills the heart, “out of the fullness of which the tongue speaks.” The moment the members of the body get tired of making the money to renew the blood, the substance of which makes fresh for the body, and the spirit of which makes life for the soul, stagnation sets in and, if not counteracted promptly, produces death of the whole organism, the whole body. The individual is the unit of the Nation. If the individual is unjust, unfaithful , untrue to himself he will be false to his neighbor; if there be more individuals of a race, of a nation, false to themselves than there are who are true, neighbor will obviously be arrayed against neighbor so that endless The Breath of Agitation Is Life (1914) / 185 strife will ensue, until the issues are determined by a measurement of arms, as in the case of the long and fierce agitation against human slavery in this country, in which the master class were whipped to their knees, but whose short-sighted sons have continued the war against the freeman and citizen, which now confronts the Afro-American people and the Nation, and who are sure to be worsted in the conclusion, as their fathers were in the beginning of the reactionary warfare, begun after the civil war, to make a race of civil slaves to take the place of the race of chattel slaves destroyed forever by the Thirteenth Amendment. It is an easier task to kidnap savages in their own country and enslave them in a foreign land than it is to enslave free men in their own land and to deprive them of their constitutional rights of manhood and citizenship. The effort to do it, which the sons of the slave fathers began in 1867, and have since labored at with the determination of demons, may take a longer time to settle than it took to settle the question of chattel slavery, but as that was settled right, so will the question of full and equal rights of manhood and citizenship be settled right. “The fight for justice once begun bequeathed is from sire to son.” I believe in the ultimate triumph of the Afro-American people, because I believe in myself, who never undertook anything with the intention of failing in the accomplishment of it, and who never failed in anything I undertook to accomplish. Why? Because I never undertook to do the impossible, and was satisfied when I had accomplished that which was possible. Many people do not appear to be able to know when they have completed their work, or the particular phase of it assigned to them. I am not one of them. I began active work as an agitator, as a journalist, in 1879, and ceased from my work as an agitator in 1907, and resigned from all of the organizations to which I belonged, except as chairman of the Executive Committee of the National Negro Business League1 and of the Committee of Twelve,2 because I had finished my work as an agitator, my phase of work of an agitator, and because I had a nervous breakdown, from the efforts of which I am still not free. But I have not ceased to be a journalist, and do not expect to cease to...

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