  For some it would or should involve assimilation, that is, processes by which one racial and/or ethnic group is absorbed by another, for some physically as well as socio-culturally, with one group relinquishing its own racial and/or ethnic cultural distinctiveness to take on the defining life-world character and practices of another. For early African American assimilationists this would have meant accepting as appropriate and sufficient goals for African American life the country’s pronounced cultural, social, political, and economic ideals—though generally without endorsements of the superiority of the White race—as proof of their humaneness and of their having “risen” from a condition of “savagery” to having become “civilized,” particularly by having become Christianized.