This speech, delivered to the American Negro Academy in Washington, D.C., in December 1899, occasioned one of Du Bois’s earliest expressions of the idea of a global color line. The speech analyzes the American “Negro problem” as a facet of a global racial hierarchy and traces various manifestations of this hierarchy across the contemporary world and through its modern history. It compares the color line, as a nineteenth- and twentieth-century phenomenon, to the distinctive problems of prior centuries, such as political rights for the masses, and regards African Americans as “pioneers” on the success of whose struggle hangs the fate of the twentieth century.