Let us repeat that the "color problem" is not a problem of color,
but of mentality. The difference between the white man, who has produced all
civilizations, and the Negro, who has few cultural possessions save those which
he has received from the white man, is not a color difference merely.
Pigmentation affects the skin only, white civilized culture is the product of
the mind's mastery over things material and spiritual. It so happens that white
skin accompanies the culturally capable, while black skin accompanies the
culturally deficient.
If the Negro had proved himself the master of things and the Caucasian had proved
himself dependent upon the Negro's progress, we should readily concede
superiority to the Negro. But as the history of civilization shows the white
man to be the master of things and the colored races merely the beneficiaries
of the white man's progress, we cannot deny superiority to the white man. Such
conclusion is not a sentimental arrogation of the white man. He who would
construct a race sociology will seek the facts of race history from which to
induce generalizations. The sentimentalist will ignore the facts. The just man
will see, in the white man's age-long domination over things, undeniable
implication of the white man's custodianship of creative genius; the
negrophilist will ignore the white race as the sole cultural factor in
progressive civilization and glibly descant upon the attainments of mankind.
The negrophilist will attribute to the human race those achievements that have
been attained by a particular sub-species of humanity. The negrophilist has not
the vision of the scientist, and cannot have, for he is color blind.
White sentimentalists and the Negroid writers of America will trace to the
institution of slavery the American Negro's cultural incapacity. Unmindful of
the truth known to ethnology; that the cultural status of the American Negro
has antecedents in Africa, they ignore the fact "that in his own country
the centuries have rolled away, finding him always in the same condition of
dense ignorance and unalleviated savagery," and that "the Caucasian
race has been for centuries, in one or another capacity, the superior guiding
or controlling force in human history, and its records contain the epitome of
human achievement. During the same period, on the contrary, the Negro has
occupied in every relation of life a subordinate position, whether as a savage
awaiting the touch of civilization, or as a servile people, existing under the
control and direction of the more highly civilized race." (The Negro
Problem: Abraham Lincoln's Solution, by William P. Pickett, pp. 8 and 30.)
Slavery, in America, left the Negro in an infinitely better condition than
it found him, but "The institution of slavery has loomed so large in our
horizon that is has completely over-shadowed that which went before it in
African history. At every mention of Negro inefficiency, improvidence or
immorality, it sufficed to recall slavery and the characteristic was
explained." (Tillinghast, The Negro in Africa and in America, p. 5)
Slavery not only left the American Negro more advanced culturally than the
African members of his race, but did this, notwithstanding the fact that the
American slaves were recruited from the "sweepings of the Sudanese
plateau" (Keane), where the inferior tribes "had been crowded to the
impassable barrier of the ocean" (Brinton). Slavery found the Negro an
animist and left him a Christian. Slavery found him a cannibal and provided him
with the meat of domestic animals. It found him a naked savage and left him
clothed and civilized. The apologists of the Negro ignore the fact that the
Negro's aptitudes as exemplified in America are a product of race as well as of
environment.
The institution of Negro slavery resulted in greater harm to the white race
than to the black. The Negro has profited through contact with the white, the
white has suffered loss through contact with the Negro. Contact with the white
man has affected the Negro through environment; it could not and cannot affect
his heredity, save that as the institution of slavery has a tendency to place a
premium upon the type of Negro best suited to servitude. In this respect
slavery did influence Negro heredity inasmuch as the slave owner often resorted
to selective breeding.
"The endowment of each generation at birth is dictated by heredity, but
all that it acquires subsequently is the gift of environment."
(Tillinghast). Mental characteristics are subject to the laws governing
heredity as well as are physical characteristics. With regard to race, heredity
and environment, Robert R. Marett, Reader of Social Anthropology in the
University of Oxford, says in his Anthropology, "nor is it enough
to take note simply of physical feature; the shape of the skull, the color of
the skin, the tint and texture of the hair and so on. There are likewise mental
characteristics that seem to be bound up closely with the organizim and to
follow the breed (p.23), "for race, let it not be forgotten, presumably
extends to mind as well as to body. It is not merely skin deep." (p. 60),
and "circumstances can unmake; but of themselves they never yet made man,
nor any other form of life." (p. 129).
Environment has placed the Negro in America above the Negro in Africa, but
environment cannot, save as a factor in evolution acting over an immense period
of time, affect Negro race traits and instincts. Suddenly released from the
white man's restraining influence, the Negro has retroceded to African
conditions. Haitian history constitutes a clear example that the environment of
the white man is not sufficient to hold the Negro to the white man's level.
When the white man disappeared there, his culture was gradually racialized by
the African.
If we are to solve the American Negro problem, we must forever be done with
the conception prevailing among not a few whites, that the Negro is such as he
is by reason of his subjection to the Caucasian. Until we do this, it is
impossible to approach the problem on a rational basis. Those who were familiar
with the condition of the slave at his introduction into America realized that
his coming hither was to result in distinct advantage to him in every respect,
spiritually as well as materially. We have seen that such consciousness caused
colonial divines to meet the slave vessels, kneel and pray, thanking God that
He had sent the benighted African to a Christian environment.
Then, too, we must be "done with the folly of saying that the Negro has
had but three decades of opportunity for self culture, when, as a matter of
fact, he has had an equal chance with the rest of mankind since the dawn of
creation." (The American Negro, by Hannibal Thomas, p. 396) Nor
shall we say that the Negro is a "child race." for he is not, but a
fully constituted adult race, as much so as the Caucasian and the Mongolian.
Also away with the ignorance shown in the belief that "each dog will have
his day," as applied to the races. When shall the Bushmen, the Hottentot
and the Pygmy assume world sovereignty? When the red Indian, the Ainu and the
Eskimo? The "races" that have had their day were white! And let us
dismiss the unwarranted assumption that environment will directly and
immediately affect heredity. Heredity may be affected in but one way:
congenitally. You may breed a superior type of Negro by selective mating,
just as you may breed a superior type of Caucasian by the same process; but no
amount of imitation will instill a creative instinct or capacity into the
Negro, nor will education or sympathetic aid of any kind.
In dealing with the Negro problem, we must accept the Negro as Negro, and adapt
our program accordingly. Six thousand years of history are sufficient to enable
us to gauge his abilities and his probabilities. He has abided at a low
cultural level during this period, and we should not endanger our future by
attributing capacities to the Negro above his proven worth. Nor are we to take
the Negro's estimate of his own value. English writers tell us that when the
European carries civilization to the backward races, these later look upon the
white man as gods and their culture as the handiwork of the gods. But a
generation of them grow up amidst this culture and look upon it as their own.
They claim a share in its control and end by asserting that they are superior
to the white man. This is so in South Africa and is equally so in the United
States, where "The gravity of the situation is further accentuated for the
reason that the ignorant and credulous freedmen have no adequate conception of
their shortcomings. Devoid of discernment and sober judgment, they pose as the
peers of their immediate fellow citizens, such is their colossal conceit, and
are imbued with the belief that the people of the North stand ready to support
and defend them in these pretensions." (Hannibal Thomas, The American
Negro, p. 227)
From the standpoint of our civilization (and we should not be affected by
any other consideration) the Negro problem is that of daily contact with a race
that has no high material history, and whose spiritual history is not in
harmony with our own, not merely the enforced contact with this race, but with
its increasing millions. We are bequeathing to posterity the greatest burden
that civilization may know; millions upon millions of an alien race whose
increase will spread over the nation.
There was almost complete cessation of the importation of Negroes into the
United States in 1808, the year set by the Federal Constitution, after which
their importation was unconstitutional. In 1810, there were 1,337,808 Negroes
in the United States. In 1910 there were 9,827,763, showing an increase of more
than sevenfold during the ten decades. Between 1860 and 1900 the Negro doubled
his numbers by natural increase. If he should re-establish such percentage of
increase during this century, there will be approximately forty million Negroes
by the end of the century. Then if we suppose that his numbers are doubled
every seventh-five years, the United States, if there be such, will contain a
hundred million Negroids at the close of the next century. Of course, by that
time the blood of the African will have largely entered into the present
dominant race. If the Negro is not removed from the United States the future
American will be a mongrel, such as the peoples of Egypt, India, and certain of
the Latin American countries.(A press dispatch from Princeton, N.J., dated
January 20, 1922, states that "Professor Edwin Grant Conklin, head of the
department of biology at Princeton University, declared today in a University
scientific lecture that the United States would have to put a stricter ban upon
immigration if it hoped to retain its present intellectual standing. Referring
to the racial problem, he said that in two hundred years there would be an
amalgamation of races in this country, even allowing for the vast differences
between whites and blacks."
Let us analyze this burden. We will not overlook the fact that the Negro in
his future millions will, by his numbers alone, limit the possibility of the
increase of just so many whites, nor will we overlook the further fact that his
presence is to Africanize American activities and ideals, even if the races
remain separate, though we know that they will not. But here in this instance
we shall consider the Negro as a depressing influence and actual burden upon
the nation in the struggle for advancement in all lines, political,
economic and social.
Sociologists tell us that human desires fall under one or another of six
grand divisions. They designate these divisions as "the interests."
They say that "an interest is an unsatisfied capacity, corresponding to an
unrealized condition, and it is predisposition to such rearrangement as would
tend to realize the indicated condition." (Albion W. Small, General
Sociology, p. 433) The six interests which cover all the desires and aims
of mankind are asserted to be those of health, wealth, sociability, knowledge,
beauty, and rightness. Three of these may call for definition.
"Sociability" is that interest utilized in harmonizing human
relations, in escaping social friction. "Beauty" is understood when
it is learned that this interest applies to the development of the fine arts.
"Rightness" applies to the securing of justice and includes the
religious interest as well. The degree of national progress is conditioned upon
the degree of realization of the "the interests."
In dealing with the interests we are upon scientific ground where the
negrophilist may not tread. Let us measure the Negro by the scale of the
interest. The difference between the Negro and the white in the fathering of
national aims is the Negro burden upon our race and its institutions.
We present here the interests as given in General Sociology (Albion W.
Small), with arbitrary selections from their subdivisions (see Appendix I).
Comment upon the "Conspectus of the Social Situation" will be
superfluous, for our purpose is but to show that the Negro is not and cannot be
a factor in national progress. Rather he can but be a burden upon the Caucasian
in the latter's striving for advancement.
With regard to the inauguration of new institutions, the Negro's influence
will be nil. The inquiry for the reader, then, is not what will the Negro
contribute to social progress, but how much burden will be upon the Caucasian
in the latter's struggle to progress. The degree in which the Negro lags
behind the Caucasian in creating and applying the material and spiritual
agencies of progress will constitute the "white man's burden;" a
burden which is to forever thwart the nation in the attainment of those
cultural heights warranted by Caucasian capacity and purpose.
Conspectus of the Social
Situation
as given in the present state of achievement and in unsolved technical problems
GRAND DIVISIONS
We are told that the Negro is with us to stay, that the
Negro problem will solve itself, that if the white man be quiescent, God will
solve the "race question." We would expect the quiescent
latitudinarians, who use the creative element in American civilization to sleep
while the non-creative element is increasing by multi-millions, to add one more
platitude and tell us that "God helps those who help themselves," but
they do not. Such would be the only sensible platitude they have uttered, but
it would defeat their purpose.
The late A.H. Keane, foremost among British ethnologists, in reviewing the
publication of Dr. R.W. Shufeldt, The Negro, said of those Americans whose
Negro policy would sacrifice the white race and its civilization in preference
to separating the races: "On this aspect of the question I read almost
with terror the warning note raised by Dr. Shufeldt, who tells us that there
are plenty of people in this country of ours who would far rather see the
entire white race here rotted by heroic injections into their veins of all the
savagery and criminality there is in the Negro., than have any number of the latter
in any way inconvenienced by their being returned to the country from which
their ancestors came.' Such fanatical regard for the susceptibilities of a race
which, after all, is entitled to scant respect, becomes a crime against
humanity, and, if persisted in, would end in national suicide. Surely they
cannot shut their eyes to the deadly result of miscegenation in Latin
America."
Dr. Shufeldt is a Northern man, a former member of the medical corps of the
United States Army and a naturalist of profound learning. His experience with
the Negro has extended to all the Southern States and to the West Indies.
During the fifty years of his scientific observation of the Negro, he has
accumulated a knowledge of that race second to none other. His publication, America's
Greatest Problem: The Negro (1915), contains the epitome of the results of
his years of investigation. He makes it clear to us that if the Negro remains
in the United States the future American is to be a mongrel and the future
civilization reduced to the level of the mongrel.
Let us compare the solutions offered by our time-serving or ignorant
demagogues with those of our greatest statesmen, men whose statesmanship and
prophetic vision have withstood the test of time and events. In company with these
great Americans, let us visualize the future. If we cannot peer into the years
before us and see the burden upon our children and our children's children, we
are not qualified to deal with the Negro problem. Men die; man lives on! We
must look to the future. This visualization is essential at the present time,
for a race problem is of such insidious nature as to be realized by the mass at
such late date as to render its effective solution an impossibility.
Jefferson, the most far-seeing of our statesmen, foretold that we awaited
separation of the races or their amalgamation. We have seen how his analysis is
true, that it agrees with every instance in the contact of races during the
sixty centuries of written history. When the Negro numbered but one million,
the fathers of the republic had already foreseen the gravity of the race
problem and they knew that not the problem of slavery, but that of the Negro;
his physical presence, whether slave or free, was a menace to our race and
institutions.
"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of
fate than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the
two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government." (Jefferson's
Works, Vol. I, 48. The author is indebted to The American Negro Problem:
Abraham Lincoln's Solution, by William P. Pickett, for this and the
quotations following, which concern the attitude of Clay, Webster, Douglas and
Lincoln.)
Jefferson repeatedly pointed out that the problem of Negro
slavery was but a phase of the Negro problem; that if the slaves were freed,
the freedmen would remain. Jefferson believed that separation was possible and
imperative.
Henry Clay was a life-long advocate of the necessity of removing the Negro
from America. He, like Madison, Monroe and numerous other foremost Americans,
from both North and South, became an active supporter of the American
Colonization Society, the purpose of which was to return the freed Negro to
Africa and which succeeded in founding the republic of Liberia, the ruling class
of which is of American origin. This organization is still in existence, with
headquarters at Washington. It is now well officered and is giving signs of a
revival of its early energy. Of late, it is urging the United States government
to intervene in behalf of Liberia and prevent further spoliation of that
republic by Great Britain and France. The United States is certain to protect
the independence of Liberia. At the request of that country the United States
is now furnishing an administrator for its customs. Liberia may prove to be a
providential gateway into Africa, at the disposal of the American government,
for the repatriation of American Negroes.
Webster came to the point when he said, "If any gentlemen from the
South shall propose a scheme to be carried on by this government upon a large
scale, for their (the Negroes') transportation to any colony or to any place in
the world, I should be quite disposed to incur almost any expense to accomplish
that object."
Stephen A. Douglas, in his contest with Abraham Lincoln for a seat in the
United States Senate (1858), said, "I am opposed to Negro citizenship in
any and every form. I believe that this government was made by white men for
the benefit of white men and their posterity forever." The immortal Lincoln
answered Douglas with, "I will say then, that I am not, nor ever have
been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality
of the white and the black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor
of making voters or jurors of the Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold
office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to
this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races
living together on terms of social and political equality."
Lincoln asserted that the purpose of the war was the preservation of the
Union, not the abolition of slavery. He freed the slaves of that part of the
Union still in rebellion in order to weaken the Confederacy. He recognized that
the Negro is, and will remain, inferior to the Caucasian, and sought to relieve
civilization of its black burden and the Negroes themselves of their hopeless
competition with the whites, by colonizing them in a foreign country. Lincoln
conceived a plan for colonization during the period of the Civil War and
proposed an amendment to the Federal Constitution which would authorize the
Congress to carry out his segregation ideal.
The untimely death of Lincoln put an end to the hope of segregation, and
other forces instituted other ideals. The reconstruction, with its subjugation
of the white South beneath the heel of the black South, was not the work of
Lincoln. Lincoln the Republican, and Douglas the Democrat, in league to save
the Union, were not responsible for giving the African a share in control of
the civilization of the Caucasian. This was the work of Sumner and Stevens, the
Republicans, and of Butler, the Democrat. They and those of their school
deracialized Caucasian institutions and sought to deracialize the Caucasian race.
It was the contemptuous rejection of the provisions of the Fourteenth
Amendment to the Federal Constitution by all the Southern and most of the
Northern States which led to the Reconstruction. Unable to secure the enactment
of this proposed amendment, the politicians in power instituted those measures
which resulted in the "Carpetbag" Negro domination of the Southern
States. When the Southern States no longer represented the will of the white
South, Their assent was obtained and the amendment passed by the necessary
majority of states. The Civil Rights Acts passed by Congress, 1866, 1870,
amended in 1871, and 1875, mark the supreme heights of American negrophilism.
Their sole intent was to level the Saxon with the African. In this respect
negrophilism in the United States equaled British negrophilism in South Africa,
but there the leveling process found none to stay its triumph, while in the
Untied States the Supreme Court intervened in behalf of the white man. Charles
Summer was the most important personality in the United States senate. His
belief in the necessity of equalizing the white with he black was not less
radical than that of Dr. Philip, whose influence threatened Caucasian supremacy
in Cape Colony. Both were actuated by a profound conviction that their policies
were necessary, and both believed themselves to be the agents of Providence in
applying the social tenets of the Christian religion.
"These were his (Summer's) saying words to Hoar: You must take care of
the Civil Rights Bill; my bill, the Civil Rights Bill, don't let it
fail.'...This law had for its purpose the obliteration of the color-line in the
South, and to give to the Negroes the full and equal privileges of all hotels,
street cars, passenger trains, steamboats, or other public conveyances, by land
or water; of theaters and all other places of public amusement. It was,
however, a milder law than the one sought by Sumner in that it did not attempt
to obliterate the color-line in churches, schools, and cemeteries." (The
Fourteenth Amendment and The States, p. 19, by Charles Wallace Collins.)
With the passage of this act, negrophilism began to wane. The
"radicals" in Congress were displaced by conservative Republicans and
by Democrats. White America was finding itself, and with the finding,
Caucasianism has risen, decade by decade, resulting in the practical reversal
of the policy of the equalizationists.
The anger caused by the war soon passed away, and that section which had
preserved the Union gave unmistakable evidence that a mistaken policy arising
from a mistaken theory would not be enforced upon a people who sought to remain
white. "Charles Francis Adams, writing from the banks of the upper Nile,
decries the utter fallacy of the theoretical rights-of-man and philanthropical
African-and-brother doctrines. In plain vernacular English they are rot;' rot'
which I myself have indulged in to considerable extent, and in the face of
observable facts which would not down, have had to outgrow...The work done by
those who were in political control at the close of our Civil War was done in
utter ignorance of the ethnological laws and total disregard of unalterable
fact.'" ("Reflex Light from Africa," Century, New Series,
Vol. 50, pp. 107,109. Quoted in Democracy and Race Friction, Mecklin,
pp. 245, 246).
Jefferson affirmed that the two races, equally free, could not live together
in the same government. Webster and Clay were ready to secure their separation
at almost any cost. Douglas and Lincoln were one in a common purpose to keep
the institutions of the white man unsullied by the influence of the black,
declaring ofttimes and unequivocally that political and social equalization of
white and black should not be tolerated. We cannot go farther to show that
prior to 1865 the great Americans were untie din opposition to the equalization
of the races, and were further united in common purpose to separate the races.
From Washington to Grant, the eminent statesmen of both North and South foresaw
that separation of the races was the only solution of the race problem.
Amalgamation of the races, the alternative to separation , has ever been
considered by the mass of Americans an unthinkable solution. A program having
for its object the interbreeding of Caucasian and Negro would be the easiest
way out of our difficulty, but such would entail an unspeakable degradation
upon posterity. Speaking of assimilation as a solution of the Negro problem,
Mecklin says: "Such solution is impossible...For the white is intolerable
and even unthinkable, as it means ultimates the substitution of something new
and unknown for his civilization and racial identity, involving perhaps the
destruction of both." (Democracy and Race Friction, p. 268, by John
Moffatt Mecklin.)
Let it be considered that the men who proposed repatriation of the Negroes
were not fanatics. They were stern and capable. They believed that their
proposed solution was possible when the Negro numbered one-fifth of the total
population of the United States. They proposed such solution when the means of
transit were insignificant in comparison with that at our disposal today. They
seriously contemplated it when our national wealth was ludicrously little as
compared to our wealth at present.
Some will say that it is vain to consider the proposal to settle forever the
Negro problem by removal of the Negro to the home of his ancestors in Africa.
Let us ask these wise critics if the present proposal is indicative of an
impractical mind, how much more unbalanced were the minds which proposed such a
remedy when our resources for its attainment were infinitely less than at
present, and when the Negro was one-fifth of the national population, whereas
he is now less than one-tenth. If the present advocates of segregation are
seeking a chimera, what were the former advocate seeking? The prospect of a
white America may disturb the repose of certain Negroid professors, or the
whites who profit by Negro labor which reduces white labor to the Negro level,
and the bigoted negrophilist whose program for the equalization of the races cannot
but end in amalgamation of the races, but the advocates of repatriation of the
American Negro to his African home are not to be influenced by such opposition.
If the ships that brought whites to our shores, many of them inferior whites
from south and southeastern Europe, during the decade prior to the world war,
had carried Negroes away, there need not now be a Negro in the Untied States.
(A similar illustration of the feasibility of deporting the Negro was used by
the Hon. John Temple Graves in an address at the University of Chicago.) If it
is possible for multi-millions of individual whites on their own initiative to
come to America at the rate of a million a per year, why is it seemingly
impossible for the richest and most powerful nation that time has produced to
remove its alien race, whose total numbers are but a little more than the
immigrants received in a decade?
Time-serving and timid individuals will tell you that repatriation of the
American Negro is an impossibility. Ask these individuals for their solution of
the problem. They have none! There can be but two solutions; separation or
amalgamation. Those who do not advocate the first are to be classed as
adherents of the latter. This is why the opponents of segregation have no
solution to offer. If there is display of weakness by white Americans with
regard to the solution of the Negro problem, is such weakness demonstrated by
the separationists or by the amalgamationists; by those who work to attain a
white America or by those whose influence is to result in a mulatto population
and in a decadent civilization? White America, or Negroid America, awaits upon
the one or the other way of solving the Negro problem. That the "great
divide" is to dwarf into a bridgeable ditch, and the "mountains are to
be made low with the valleys" in the America of the future, is a law of
the contact of races which is clearly discernible to the more capable mulattoes
and near-whites, who chafe under restrictions at present enforced, denying them
full access to Caucasian circles. If the races dwell together they will
eventually amalgamate, and this the Negroes know as well as do the whites.
In what way shall the Negro problem be solved? Is the answer to be in accord
with the proposed solutions of the foremost statesmen which the nation has
produced, or are we to drift on to the solution of amalgamation? Separation
will make America white and insure the permanence of our race and culture.
Amalgamation will make America Negroid and its culture the expression of the
mentality of the Negroid.