Take Your Choice
Separation or Mongrelization

By Theodore G. Bilbo

Chapter XII
THE DANGERS OF
AMALGAMATION
A god created the whites;
I know not who created
the blacks; certainly a
devil created the mongrels.
-African proverb
THOSE PERSONS who plead for a mongrelized Nation are forced to deny that the intermingling of whites and Negroes will prove harmful in any respect. If they admit the inferiority of the offspring of such unions to either the Caucasian or the Negro races, then their case for amalgamation is lost. It is our purpose here to show that the mixing of the white and Negro races is unquestionably most harmful, yea, totally destructive to the white race.

We have already determined that the Negro race is physically, mentally, and morally inferior to the white race, (1) and those who accept this comparison can readily see the dangers of amalgamation. In fact, it is difficult to understand how any sober-minded man can hesitate to conclude that the mingling of the inferior with the superior will result in the lowering of the higher stock. This is true of the crossing of plants, of the crossing of animals, and thousands of years of racial contact have proved that it is true of the crossing of the different races of mankind.

Concerning the inferiority of the mixbreed, Professor Smith has said:

We shall content ourselves with citing a single authority, than whom there is none higher; whom not even the most suspicious will suspect of Southern ignorance and prejudice. We allude to the distinguished author of 'The American Commonwealth,' and the 'Assimilation of Races in the United States.'

In his Romanes Lecture of June 7, 1902, on 'The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind,' Mr. Bryce says (p. 24): 'Where two races are physiologically near to one another the result of intermixture is good. Where they are remote, it is less satisfactory, by which I mean not only that it is below the level of the higher stock, but that it is not generally and evidently better than the lower stock.... But the mixture of whites and negroes, or of whites and Hindus, or of the American aborigines and negroes, seldom shows good results. The hybrid stocks, if not inferior in physical strength to either of those whence they spring, are apparently less persistent, and might - so at least some observers hold - die if they did not marry back into one or other of the parent races. Usually, of course, they marry back into the lower.' (N. B. Mr. Bryce, it appears, is so 'provincial, unintelligent and unchristian' as to assume that the Whites are superior - a higher stock, and the Negroes inferior - a lower stock!) Again, p. 26: '... the two general conclusions which the facts so far as known suggest are these: that races of marked physical dissimilarity do not tend to intermarry, and that when and so far as they do, the average offspring is apt to be physically inferior to the average of either parent stock, and probably more beneath the average mental level of the superior than above the average mental level of the inferior.' Again, p. 35: 'Should this view be correct, it dissuades any attempt to mix races so diverse as are the white European and the negroes.' And on p. 36: 'The matter ought to be regarded from the side neither of the white nor of the black:, but of the future of mankind at large. Now for the future of mankind nothing is more vital than that some races should be maintained at the highest level of efficiency, because the work they can do for thought and art and letters, for scientific discovery, and for raising the standard of conduct, will determine the general progress of humanity. If therefore we were to suppose the blood of the races which are now most advanced to be diluted, so to speak, by that of the most backward, not only would more be lost to the former than would be gained to the latter, but there would be a loss, possibly an irreparable loss, to the world at large.' Lastly, p. 39: 'The moral to be drawn from the case of the Southern States seems to be that you must not, however excellent your intentions and however admirable your sentiments, legislate in the teeth of facts....' (2)

In the Biological Basis of Human Nature, H. S. Jennings, one of the world's leading authorities, writes: "To the superior race admixture with the inferior one is adulteration; it means a lowering of quality. All other biological consideration give way to this one." (3) And Lothrop Stoddard says: "Two things are necessary for the continued existence of a race: it must remain itself, and must breed its best.... Hence, when a highly specialized stock interbreeds with a different stock, the newer less stable, specialized characters are bred out, the variation, no matter how great its potential value to human evolution, being irretrievably lost.... And, of course, the more primitive a type is, the more prepotent it is. This is why crossings with the negro are uniformly fatal. Whites, Amerindians, or Asiatics - all are alike vanquished by the invincible prepotency of the more primitive, generalized, and lower negro blood." (4)

There was a time when it was generally contended that the mulatto was inferior to both the white and the black parent, and there are still those who belong to this school of thought. From a moral standpoint, the pure Negro with his God - given heritage of racial integrity is certainly superior to the mulatto, the quadroon, or octoroon. And there are many half-breeds who are inferior in every respect to the pure - blood Negro. On the other hand, there are undoubtedly numerous cases where the mulatto distinctly rises above his coal-black parent and some cases where he rises above the median line and approaches the level of his white parent.

F. L. Hoffman in Race Traits and Tendencies says that the mulatto is inferior to the pure Negro and possessed of the least vital force of all races. According to Hoffman, mulattoes are physically and morally lower than blacks. but intellectually they are superior. (5) A. H. Shannon writes: "The mulatto may be superior to the negro; he certainly is inferior to the Caucasian both in intellectual ability and physical vigor. At best, amalgamation can improve the negro only at the expense of the white race. Amalgamation is not, therefore, desirable on scientific grounds; it is revolting when considered in its ethical bearings." (6)

Regardless of the number of authorities which might be quoted, we are quite aware that there are still those who will argue for amalgamation. If these advocates of a mongrelized Nation contend that the Negro race is the equal of the Caucasian and in no way inferior, it is still impossible for them to present a convincing argument for the mixing of the races. This is true because they must admit certain physical differences between the Negro and the white man. These physical characteristics of the black race exist and must be recognized even by those who contend that there is no inferiority attached thereto. When the blood of this black race is mixed with white, the mulatto offspring of the union possesses a combination of the characteristics of the two races. If these equality advocates now say that the Negro or mulatto can not be undeniably proved to be inferior, then we answer that it can not be proved that the pure Negro, the mulatto, or any mix-breed of white-Negro blood is the equal of the white man.

If the mulatto can not be proved the equal of the white man or if there is even a reasonable doubt that equality does not exist, then amalgamation must be condemned. This is true because the mixing of the blood of the races is a fatal process. It cannot be said to be a matter of trial and error, for if the scheme of mongrelization is tried and found to be an error, there is no remedy. Corrupted blood can not be redeemed. Professor Smith has asked these questions: "Who, then, would have the foolhardihood to make this experiment of race amalgamation - an experiment which, once made, is made forever; whose consequences could never be undone - when there is at least and at the very lowest an undeniable possibility, not to say certainty, that those consequences would be disastrous in the extreme? Can we imagine a more wanton folly? Would such an experiment beseem any other place so well as the madhouse?" (7)

Some years ago, a colored man, William H. Thomas, reported to be one-sixteenth Negro, wrote a book entitled, The American Negro; What he Was, What he Is, and What he May Become. The arguments which Thomas presented have been thoroughly answered by that profound scholar of the race question, Dr. R. W. Shufeldt. After quoting Thomas's plea for interracial marriage because the "inevitable outcome" of amalgamation will be "a perfect blending of our heterogeneous peoples," Dr. Shufeldt says:

I can conceive of no greater calamity that could happen to the people of this country than this. We have here at least a certain proportion of the population who can call themselves true Americans, - a race that although it came from the Old World, is a composite stock of great antiquity, and one that has arrived at a stage of civilization unexcelled by any other race in the entire range of history. This civilization speaks for itself, and it is not necessary for me to dilate upon it. And it is this civilization, the building of which has taken thousands of years, that Thomas would now jeopardize by the injection into it of a poison so foul that, whenever or wherever it mixes with it, rottenness is the only result.

Has Thomas ever seen a case of atavism in this country, resulting from the very interbreeding he so extravagantly proposes? Permit me to give an account of one that a few years ago came under my personal notice. A young American artisan of the better class and of excellent type, born of parents born in this country, and untainted by any mixture of African blood, meets a young and very pretty girl in Virginia, and in due course marries her. At the end of a year a boy child is born to them; but, horror of horrors! it is found to be as black as coal, and with hair as kinky as the veriest young Congo that a negress of that race ever gave birth to in Africa. Imagine the state of mind this at once threw the unhappy husband into! His poor young wife pleaded with him that he was the only man who had ever embraced her, and that the very suggestion of receiving the approaches of an African were most repugnant and disgusting to her. But the husband knew there must be a cause for it, as he was present in the room when the black child was born, and he quietly went to work to investigate his wife's antecedents. After no end of trouble and expense, he finally ascertained that her great grandmother was a plantation slave who had borne several children to her master. It was in this stock, through crossing and recrossing with other whites, that this young wife saw her pedigree, and her first child was simply a reversion to the black ancestry on her maternal side, which had inherited the African characteristics, and among them the black skin and kinky hair. I have heard of several other well-authenticated cases of this nature.

This is what Thomas would make general throughout the country, that Europe may point the finger at the American and say: Go to! You have negro in your blood, and you come of a mixed race who were slaves and eaters of human flesh. (8)

When colored writers such as Thomas plead for the amalgamation of the races, do they not admit that the Negro race can not equal the achievements of the white race? When he says, "The future American negro will part, undoubtedly, with many of his racial characteristics as he approximates in color and conduct the white race," does he not acknowledge the superiority of the white race? Of course, he does. In fact, he frankly states the Negro's inferiority by saying: "As we have already shown, the pure negro people are, by the very nature of their characteristic endowments, precluded from reaching a high degree of efficiency. Whatever the freedman has achieved in the way of intelligence and character is due to alien characteristics incorporated into his being through race amalgamation." (9)

Any Negro who pleads for the mixture of the blood of the races is condemning the blood of his fathers. He may wish, as did Thomas, to improve the Negro race "by an infusion of virile blood," but no gain to the black race is worth the destruction of the Caucasian. And we certainly have the right to question the motives of some of the advocates of miscegenation. Is their primary desire to improve the Negro race or is it to make everyone else mongrels like themselves?

Negroes who do not value their racial integrity should be interested in the following observation which was made by a Southern writer: "Of the five races with which the Earth is peopled, only one, the Negro, is ashamed of his race and tries to be something other than what GOD made him. Neither the Red, Yellow nor Brown races want to be white; as the Negro ever strives to become. Instead of having that pride-of-race attached to the white, red, yellow and brown races, the black race is wholly lacking in that attribute; ashamed of his ancestry, and always trying to get as far from it as possible - deluding himself with claims of equality with the white race that are not borne out by his appearance, his present attainments nor his background in recorded history." (10)

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae monie a conceit free us--

In I926 and I927, C. B. Davenport and Morris Steggerda made a study of miscegenation under the auspices of the Carnegie Institute of Washington. After studying whites, blacks, and hybrids, the authors compiled the results of their findings in the book, Race Crossing in Jamaica. The conclusions which were drawn from the many tests that were given were that the mix-breeds graded much closer to the blacks in differential traits than they did to the whites. It was shown that black traits were perhaps dominant in the mix-breeds, and they showed no evidence of what has been referred to as hybrid vigor.

In a speech before the House of Representatives, Congressman Joseph R. Bryson, of South Carolina, said: "On the basis of test performances, whites are superior to Negroes. The testing of the drafted soldiers during World War I gave the first extensible body of data on Negro-white differences in this country. In a special analysis of the results of this study by C. Brigham, Princeton University Press, 1923, the conclusion was reached that there was clear evidence for the innate intellectual superiority of whites over Negroes. R Pintner, Intelligence Testing, 1931, after summarizing the results up to 1930, came to the following conclusion: 'All results show the Negro decidedly inferior to the whites on standardized intelligence tests.... These results are sufficiently numerous and consistent to point to a racial difference in intelligence. ' "

Congressrnan Bryson continued: "P. L. Boynton in his Intelligence, Its Manifestation and Measurement, 1933, concludes: 'That most studies point so definitely to the superiority of the average white over the average Negro that it would seem justifiable to assume this condition to exist.' P. C Young, for example, administered the national intelligence test to 282 whites and 277 Negro children in Baton Rouge and Lake Charles, Louisiana. Principals and teachers assisted in labeling the Negro subjects lighter, darker, and miscellaneous. He found a 'noticeable decrease of intelligence as we go from the white child to light Negroes and then to dark Negroes' and concluded that the light Negroes were on the average I9.7 per cent more intelligent than the dark Negroes. This may be explained by the hypothesis that white blood makes them more intelligent than the dark Negroes." (11)

Professor Boas, who made his outstanding plea for the intermarriage of the white and black races, admitted that mental differences did exist between the races, with the higher mentality belonging to the white race. Does not this one admission make all the pleas for amalgamation but "as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal"? Scientific facts are cold and hard, but where is the scientist worthy of the name who will say that the mixing of a superior stock with an inferior one will not result in the lowering of the higher? If the white race with its higher mentality mixes with the black race, it is an unalterable fact that the hybrid offspring will possess a mentality somewhere between the average of the two races. And does it not follow that if the mulatto is mentally or any other way inferior to the white man, the mixing of the white and black races is harmful and should be forbidden.

Science teaches of the dangers of the amalgamation of the white and Negro races. However, anyone who doubts the harmful results of miscegenation need not accept the conclusions of the scientist or the warning of the historian or the advice of those who believe in racial integrity. He may observe the mulattoes in our own Nation or he may go to South America and study the results of the mixing of the races which has occurred there. It is certain that any sensible, fairminded person who will make an impartial investigation will come to the inescapable conclusion that the mulatto is unquestionably and undeniably the inferior of the white man.

It is our contention that even if science and history did not prove the mix-breed to be the inferior of whites, there is still another reason why the intermingling of the blood of the races should never be sanctioned. We approach all questions with a belief in the existence of a Supreme Ruler Whose laws can not be denied. The very fact that separate and distinct races of mankind have been created makes it impossible for anyone to claim that God did not ordain the racial distinction. When man breaks the laws of God and brings about the mixing of the blood of the different races, he and his posterity will pay the penalty. From this there is no escape. Archibald Coody IV has wisely said: "The Creator made them (the races) as they are, and the wise man accepts the work of the Maker. Foolish men seek to remake races according to their crazy plans. And when they have done their worst the subjects are two-fold more children of hell than before." (12) Mongrelization works nowhere in the Animal Kingdom from snakes to mankind. Without respect to inferior and superior, if you crossbreed Hereford and Jersey, you have neither milch cow nor a beef cow. If you crossbreed an Irish setter with a blood hound, you have neither bird dog nor man hunter. If you should crossbreed Percheron with "Man O' War," you would have neither race horse nor draft horse. Consequently, when the superior is mixed with the inferior, you will inevitably get an offspring of inferior quality.

At this point, we wish to point out another reason why the blood of the white and black races should not be mixed. Perhaps it is a contention which we could not call upon the cold facts of science to verify, but it is a fact upon which all white men are agreed. The white race produces men and women who possess a greater physical beauty than the colored races. "Does some one say that physical beauty is a poor, inferior thing at best - that beauty of soul is alone sufficient and only desirable? We deny it outright," says Professor Smith. "Beauty of form and colour has its own high and inalienable and indefectible rights, its own profound significance for the history alike of nature and of man. Even if the intermingling of bloods wrought no other wrong than the degradation of bodily beauty; the coarsening of feature and blurring of coloration, it would still be an unspeakable outrage, to be deprecated and prevented by all means in our power." (13)

We are fully aware that every race and every man have particular ideas of beauty, but since the white man is in the majority in this country, he has not only the right but the duty to preserve his own ideal of perfection - the womanhood of his race. Ira Calvin of Brookline, Massachusetts, has made an able plea for the preservation of the white race, and he has interwoven throughout his book, The Lost White Race, a profound appeal for the protection of the pretty pink skin, blue eyes and blonde hair" of "our lovely women." Says Mr. Calvin:

Even Nature cries out that a pretty white girl is its supreme effort to produce a living being both beautiful and intelligent. It displays its displeasure at a union of black and white by making the offspring neither beautiful nor very intelligent. A female of such a union finds that the lovely clothes displayed in the shop windows do not blend with her dusky skin, and that every pretty color is made for pure white skins only. She finds also that her features and lips are negroid.... White men haven't protected and preserved the delicate whiteness of their women's skins these thousands of years to wind up by handing them over to the colored races to despoil. They will die first! (14)
Why should any white man advocate a mongrelized Nation when he knows that when this condition is brought about the physical beauty of his race will be forever marred? The superior beauty which is attached to white blood is too generally recognized to be disputed. The following comment is interesting:
A familiar illustration of the Negro's limitations is found in the practices of the three outstanding mail order houses of America - Sears-Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, retail, and Butler Bros wholesale - all domiciled in the North and unaffected by Southern influences. These concerns each distribute millions of expensive catalogues, carrying thousands of attractive human likenesses - beautiful women and handsome men - to demonstrate the appearance of their clothing offerings as worn. Among these thousands of illustrations, not one of Negro or Negress is found! There is a reason, a God-given, physical, non-political reason for this 'racial-discrimination,' and that reason is simply the Negro race, whose dark skin, dull, expressionless eyes, flat nose and thick lips (facts) do not lend themselves to illustrations of harmony and beauty as those characteristics are regarded by the superior race. (15)
While the mulatto is inferior to the white man, it is often true that those generally recognized as leaders of the Negro race have some degree of white blood in their veins. It is also true that this is the group which leads the campaign for racial equality in the United States. The supersensitive mongrels are constantly agitating the race question and clamoring for the destruction of all racial lines in this country.

In 1918, E. B. Reuter issued his comprehensive study of Negroes who had achieved prominence during the three hundred years of their history in this Nation. In the book, The Mulatto in the United States, which gives the results of Reuter's studies, there are 246 persons listed. Of this group, 227 were mulattoes, 16 pure-blooded Negroes, and 13 unclassified. Thus, the list included fourteen mulattoes to one black. It has been estimated that during the period which this study covered, ten per cent of the Negroes in the United States were mulattoes which means that ten per cent of the race produced eighty-five per cent of the leaders. However, it should be noted here that many of the so-called leaders of the Negro race are prominent chiefly because they are Negroes. As white men, they would pass unnoticed, but when classified as Negroes, they stand at the head of the race.

Stuart 0. Landry has observed: "Of course, the Negroes who have come into prominence in the last quarter century are not listed, but I think that Reuter's proportion of mulattoes to pure Negroes would still hold true." (16)

The half-breed Negroes in the United States are objectionable factors to our Nation and to our civilization. Many of them specialize in agitating the race question and promoting conflict between the white and black races. "They are dangerous from whatever point we may elect to view them, says Dr. Shufeldt, "as they may possess all the vicious and sensual traits of the negro, without the color of the latter's skin as a warning flag to the unwary. In any question at issue they will invariably choose sides with the colored race, and from their keener wits and higher intelligence they are capable of giving a greater amount of trouble. Then, too, mulattoes have better opportunities to contract white alliances in marriage, and thus insidiously perpetuate their savage blood. This is most deplorable; for, as I have frequently remarked, the negro has absolutely nothing of the slightest value in his organization that can be added to our own; while, on the other hand, nearly everything about him, mentally, morally and physically, is undesirable in the highest degree. . Mulattoes have no higher sense of our civilization than has the black stock from which they are derived. I have found them equally superstitious, treacherous, mendacious, and unreliable. The better class of hybrids command place and position in this country; many regard them as colored doctors, colored lawyers, colored clergymen, colored poets and authors and so on; whereas, as a matter of fact, they are nothing of the kind - they are hybrids, nothing more nor less, and often with a very minute tincture of the African blood in them." (17)

A group of the present day leaders of the Negro race has been referred to as the "Mulatto Menace" by Horace C. Wilkinson, Birmingham attorney. In a speech before the Kiwanis Club of Ensley, Alabama, in December, 1942, Mr. Wilkinson said:

My subject today is the Mulatto Menace. I selected that for m subject because a group of mulatto agitators are, in my judgment, a menace to the negro race and a menace to America.

This group, the offspring of generation after generation of illegal unions, are selectively and congenitally immoral on both sides - immorality of the most degrading type since both were untrue to the purity of the race to which they were born.

This group, aided and abetted by some unfortunate whites, has made the negro question a national problem, not a sectional issue. These people are the leaders and advisors of the negro race. The Natlonal Association for the Advancement of 'Colored' People, ant other similar negro pressure groups are working to make the negro ashamed of his dark color. They want to make a counterfeit white man of him.

Continuous efforts are being made to convince the negro that he is abused. It is claimed that we must now state our aims and that these must exclude any element of race consciousness. Unhappy and unattainable ideas of social equality and ultimate amalgamation are being urged upon the negro. Intermixture and inter-marriage and the destruction of segregation is the ultimate aim and secret ambition of these pressure groups whose activities are centered in Washington where they are undertaking to make the Federal Government accessory to the crime. (18)

There seems to be no doubt but that the official staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is light in color. We have no record of the ancestry of this group, but it has been reported that Walter White, the Executive Secretary, is only one-sixty-fourth Negro. (19) And Edwin R. Embree, the President of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, one of the purposes of which is to better conditions of Negroes in America, has written a book, 13 Against the Odds, in which he has thrown some light on the parentage of a number of the most prominent Negroes in the United States. We presume that the blood which runs in their veins is typical of that of the outstanding Negro leaders of today.

Mr. Embree conducted a poll in which a special panel of two hundred persons, white and colored, selected the Negroes who had attained the greatest prominence in the United States. "There was a great deal of variation in the choices, says the author. "But the poll was so definite that the following thirteen persons stand out as at least representative of highest distinction among Brown Americans today." The thirteen Negroes whose biographies compose 13 Against the Odds are listed below in the order in which they appear in the book, and the statement following each gives Mr. Embree's description of the parentage and blood of these who have been named the outstanding "Brown Americans."

Mary McLeod Bethune: Her parents were black slaves with "not a drop of any blood but African."

Richard Wright: His parents were "part white, part black part Indian."

Charles S. Johnson: His father was a "brown boy" who married an "octoroon, Winifred Branch."

Walter White: "Son of a fair-skinned Georgia postman and his fair-skinned wife, Walter White, is a blue-eyed blond. He is so light that no one thinks of him as having Negro blood.... Actually he does not know the percentage of his black ancestry, and he doesn't care."

George Washington Carver: "Born a slave in the early sixties, nobody knows just when, the boy never knew his father or mother."

Langston Hughes: "He has white blood on his father's side from a Jewish slave trader; his mother's people were French, Irish, and Indian, as well as Negro."

Marian Anderson: Her mother had "light-brown skin" while her father was "much darker."

W. E. Du Bois: "Du Bois has in his veins the blood of all the great races of man. On his father's side were French Hugenots who came to this country in 1674 and whose life with Negro women threw this branch of the family into the colored group, though his own father-small, handsome, olive-skinned - was no darker than his New England neighbors." On his mother's side, his great-grandmother was an "African girl" and there was an "Indian strain" as well as more Negro and "Dutch" blood.

Mordecai W. Johnson: His mother "had a skin of burnished copper" and his father was an ex-slave.

William Grant Still: "One grandfather of each of his parents had been Irish: one an overseer and one a rich planter. Grandmothers on each side had Cherokee blood. His mother's father was a Spanish landowner in Florida. There was so little of Africa on either side of the family that his father, with straight black hair and clear-cut features, passed for white anywhere he pleased, and his mother, equally white but with brown eyes and dark, wavy hair, looked like a Castilian."

A. Philip Randolph: His father, "black, possibly pure African" married a "light mulatto."

Joe Louis: His father was "half white and his mother part Indian."

Paul Robeson: "His mother, a tall slender woman of strikingly Indian type with straight black hair and reddish brown skin, was a Bustill" and she traced her ancestry through "Quakers, Indians, and Negroes." His father worked "his way from slavery."

From the information listed above which has been taken from Embree's 13 Against the Odds, it may be noted that in this group of Negroes who have attained the greatest prominence in the United States, only one, Mary McLeod Bethune, is definitely said to be of pure Negro blood. Another one of the group, George Washington Carver, may have been born of Negro parents since no information about his father and mother is given. This would leave eleven of the thirteen classified as having the blood of other races mixed with their Negro blood. From this proportion of eleven to two, we may conclude, that the mixed bloods produced eighty-five percent of the outstanding "brown Americans." Thus, the percentage of prominent Negroes in the United States who have part white blood seems to be about the same today as it was in 1918 when the study was made by E. B. Reuter.

It is also interesting to note that practically all of the men in Mr. Embree's list may be said to have "discriminated" against full-blooded Negroes for they married "light-skinned" women, and two of them, Richard Wright and William Grant Still, married white women. The author says: "In 1940 Richard Wright married Ellen Poplar, a Jewish girl of New York City, whom he met in one of the left-wing groups of earlier days." And he describes William Grant Still's wife as a "Russian Jewish musician." There can be no doubt about how these two Negroes feel about inter-racial marriage; they have endorsed the amalgamation of the races in the most effective of all manners.

The attitude of Wright and Still toward the marriage of whites and Negroes is not new and is not unique among certain groups of Negroes and negrophiles today. It has long been the desire of these factions to promote inter-racial marriage. As early as 1864, D. G. Croly wrote:

All that is needed to make us the finest race on Earth is to engraft upon 'em the negro element, which Providence has placed by our side on this continent.... The white people of America are dying for want of fresh blood . . . until church and state and society recognize not only the propriety but the necessity of the marriage of white and black.... in short, until the great truth shall be declared in our public documents and announced in the messages of our Presidents, that it is desirable that the white man shall marry the black woman and the white woman the black man. (21)
It is with regret that we must deface these pages with the above quotation, but it is the same doctrine which these modern full-equality advocates are preaching although many of them are not bold enough to admit it. Sterling A. Brown, colored professor at Howard University, has said: "Some Negro public speakers, faced with the question (of intermarriage), dodge behind statements like, 'Well, I'm married already myself.' Some take refuge in Kipling's line, 'Never the twain shall meet,' without sharing Kipling's assurance of hope. The twain have met and the twain will meet." (22)

Following the example of W. E. B. Du Bois, perhaps the most outstanding of all the Negroes in the United States today, many of the Negro leaders openly endorse intermarriage of the races. As part of their program they seek the repeal of the statutes which the majority of the forty-eight states - to be exact thirty - have enacted to prevent white-Negro marriages.

The following states prohibit marriage between the white and Negro races: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming. In addition to prohibiting the intermarriage of whites and Negroes, some of the state laws prohibit the marriage of a Caucasian to a Mongolian or a Malay or an Indian. However, in eighteen states, mainly east of the Mississippi river and north of the Mason and Dixon Line, and in the District of Columbia public sentiment has never been strong enough to force the enactment of a statute forbidding interracial marriage.

Public opinion throughout the United States unquestionably frowns on the marriage of whites and Negroes although some states permit such unions. Comparatively speaking, there are few Negroes in the states where there are no legal prohibitions on intermarriage. More than 10,000,000 of the Nation's 12,865,518 Negroes live in states where white-Negro marriages are forbidden by law.

In the majority of interracial marriages which take place in the North the man is a Negro or mulatto and the woman white. It has been estimated from studies of intermarriage in Boston, New York, Michigan, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts that in eighty-three percent of the white-Negro marriages, the groom is a Negro. The social and economic status of Negroes who marry white persons is generally higher than the average, while the white men, and particularly the white women, who marry Negroes are of a lowclass, socially and economically.

"Boston furnishes us with the best record of mixed marriages available." says Stuart O. Landry. "From 1867 to 1890 the mixed marriages in Boston averaged 25 per year. In 1904 in Boston 13.6% of all the Negro marriages were mixed marriages. In 1918 this percentage had gone to 5.2% and in 1923 it was 3.1%, but in 1938 it rose to 3 7%." (23) And from studies in other states, Mr. Landry concludes that about 575 marriages between whites and Negroes take place yearly in the United States.

In asking for the complete political, economic, and social equality of the races, the Negro leaders are unquestionably asking that Negroes be accorded the right to marry white people. In addition to the attempts to abolish the legal restrictions on such unions, the propagandists are extremely active in advising interracial marriage and in advertising the "success" of mixed marriages. In recent months the magazine Negro Digest has featured articles in each issue under the heading of "Does Interracial Marriage Succeed?" The purpose of these articles is undeniably to promote and encourage the marriage of whites and Negroes.

In the April, 1945, issue of Negro Digest, William Grant Still, Negro composer of classical music, and his white wife, Verna Arvey, also a musician, proclaimed the success of their marriage. From this statement: "If there were the shadows of lynchings in one of our racial pasts, there was also the remembrance of anti-Jewish pogroms in old Russia, in which the other's great-grandfather had been murdered. If there had been discriminations against Negroes, there had also been - less noticeable, but undeniably present - discriminations against Jews," we see that the white wife in this marriage is Russian Jewish. After telling about their backgrounds, their "common interest" in music and their friends this couple says: "All right, let's think of the children. They certainly won't have to suffer any more than any other colored person in America has had to suffer." With this statement this white wife refers to her colored children, who will be classified as Negroes in the United States. Regardless of how one may view the laws of man regarding intermarriage of the races, the laws of God are undeniable. It has been so ordained that when a white woman crosses the color line and marries outside her race, she does not reproduce herself; she can not perpetuate the blood of her race. She becomes the mother of a colored child, not a white one. From this truth, there is no escape.

Writing in May, 1945, Negro Digest, Jack Johnson, former Negro heavyweight champion of the world, makes some observations on his private life. His first marriage to a "colored girl" ended when "she turned to another man." When he had won the boxing championship of the world, he married a white woman who found escape from the "gossip and slander" by taking her own life. Johnson says: "She was the first victim, the high price I had to pay for the 'crime' of marrying outside my race." In his third marriage, he made "another unsuccessful attempt to find happiness in marriage to a white woman." After this marriage, he "become entangled with the law" and was sentenced to serve one year and a day in prison on a Mann act charge. "When I paid my debt to 'white society'," writes Johnson, "and finished serving my sentence, I married another white woman." Still living with this third (white) wife, he says, "I have no regrets, no sorrows" and he recommends and endorses interracial marriages. Such a man may write that marriage between whites and Negroes "can and does succeed" but his words fall on deaf ears.

George S. Schuyler, colored Associate Editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, and his white wife, Josephine, stated in an article appearing in the June, 1945, Negro Digest, that "individuals who cross the marital color line must be people of superior courage." They evidently mean that they must have the "courage" to ignore public opinion for they add: "Or at least they should have a healthy disdain for the opinions of the crowd." It certainly must be agreed that persons who marry outside their races invoke the condemnation of the members of both races who believe in racial integrity. Without a doubt, public opinion throughout the United States generally condemns the marriage of whites and Negroes even though such marriages occur where the unions are legal.

The white people of the various states of this Nation have a right to forbid interracial marriage by law. And whether such statutes exist or not, they have the right to condemn by public opinion and by social ostracism any white man or woman who crosses the color line and marries a Negro. Self-preservation is a universal law and the prohibition of itnterracial marriage is necessary for the preservation of the white race.

It can be truthfully said that the white people who advocate social equality of the races are seldom sincere. Some of them preach the equality doctrine for political or other reasons best known to themselves. But as far as we know none of the prominent white advocates of complete racial equality has gone so far as to carry out the doctrine of intermarriage by marrying a Negro.

The following statement is noteworthy:

The inconsistency of that (Social gain) is found in the absence of Negro or Negress among the several marriages in the White House family. What explanation does Mrs. Rooseveit tender to her Negro proteges for THAT? If the Negro is the equal of the white man socially; (if) Negresses (are the equal) of those admirable young women, wives of the four Roosevelt boys, why that discrimination? Evidently those young Roosevelts take ABRAHAM LlNCOLN seriously in his debate with Douglas; nor do they believe that a lot of mulatto grandchildren would enhance the attractiveness of the White House. That condition respecting the White House family, prevails in a similar degree all through the country, as these FACTS prove:

The United States Senate is composed of 96 white Senators, none of whom ever contracted marriage among the Negro race.

The House of Representatives consists of 429 white males, none of whom ever contracted marriage with a Negress, and 5 white women members, none of whom ever contracted marriage with a Negro. (The sole Negro Representative, to his credit, married within his own race.)

The 9 Supreme Court Justices confined matrimonial alliances to their own white race, as did all U. S. Judges throughout the Union. Governors of the 48 States are white men, none of whom ever married a Negress - all practiced 'race-discrimination' in the selection of life-partners, as did the head of every State University and all members of State Supreme Courts.

FACTS are stubborn things, and all persons referred to in the above list, to which may be added the President's Cabinet, are guilty of that same 'race discrimination' hurled by mu]atto-minded editors against the Southern whites! To say the least of it, 'race discrimination' in the South, as regards matrimony has precedent in the highest official circles - not excepting the White House, whose home-hating mistress does not practice in her own family, that policy which she preaches so tirelessly within her social and political orbit.

The insincerity of those Negrophiles who inspire interracial gatherings and flood the press with assertions that the Negro race is equal to the white, is proven by a simple test - one that never fails. Ask him:

'If you have a white daughter of marriageable age would you be willing for a NEGRO to marry her?'

His reply, prompt, positive and emphatic, is 'NO'! In that reply, the Negro race finds full evidence that claims of equality with the white race, with which white renegades delude them are 'but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals,' and with no motive above politics. If the Negroes, themselves, will put this question to that type of whites - pointedly and publicly - the embarrassment following will perceptibly chill the enthusiasm of 'interracial' gatherings.(24)

There is no middle ground on the question of interracial marriage. A person either favors or condemns such unions. The Negroes and negrophiles in the United States today who are waging the campaign for complete racial equality must be assumed to favor the amalgamation of the races unless they have openly stated their opposition.

The danger of amalgamation may be stated very simply - it means the destruction of the white race. When the blood of the white and Negro races mix, the fair-skinned Caucasian is lost beneath the black flood. This result can not be denied. And because miscegenation means the death of the white race, every white person not only has the right but the duty to do all in his power to prevent such destruction.

Just as every white man has the right to marry a white woman in preference to a Negress so he has the right to join with the majority of his fellow citizens to prohibit any other member of his race from forming such a union. When the majority believes that society is endangered by the marriage of whites with Negroes or Mongolians, they may prohibit such unions by statute. This right is a fundamental principle of our Reptlblican form of government.

The fact that a white man believes that white-Negro marriages should he prohibited is no indication that he thinks the Negro should he treated with cruelty or injustice. It is often true that those who criticize the Southern policy of racial segregation recognize no neutral ground between love and daggers' points or in physical embrace. There is, of course, hatred. They seem to think that the races must be either at no excuse for such ignorance. A man may use all the power at his command to see that Negroes are treated with fairness, justice, and consideration and still refuse to marry a Negress or to recognize socially any white person who crosses the color line.

Southern white people have been greatly alarmed by the intensity of the current campaign for racial equality in this Nation. They have lived with the race problem for generations and have gained knowledge which many of their Northern friends have had no opportunity to gain. Southern white people know and realize the dangers of amalgamation, and they have been quick to condemn the agitators and troublemakers who have been attempting to spread the doctrine of social equality of the races in the Southland. The following quotation from a resolution passed by the House of Representatives of South Carolina's General Assembly in 1944 is typical:

We indignantly and vehemently denounce the intentions of all organizations seeking the amalgamation of the white and Negro races by a commingling of the races upon any basis of equality as being destructive to the identity and characteristics and integrity of both races, and as being un-American and hostile to the existence and preservation of the American Union of States.

We reaffirm our belief in and our allegiance to established white supremacy as now prevailing in the South, and we solemnly pledge our lives and our sacred honor to maintain it, whatever the cost, in war and in peace.

At the close of the War Between the States, a Confederate soldier inscribed a poem on the back of a Confederate note. These are the words which he wrote on the worthless piece of paper:
Represenating nothing on God's Earth now
And naught in the waters below it
As the pledge of a nation that passed away
Keep it, dear friend, and show it.

Show it to those who will lend an ear
To the tale this trifle will tell
Of Liberty born of a patriot's dream
Of a storm cradled nation that fell.

Amalgamation can write the same obituary for the United States of America by insuring that the future generations of Americans will sink into hopeless depths of mongrelization from which there can be no return. On the other hand, a white America can guard and protect the white blood in her veins, guarantee the right of Caucasian racial integrity to generations yet unborn, maintain her civilization and continue to rise in strength and power.


Go to Next Chapter
Return to TYC - Table of Contents

Notes
  1. See Chapter VI.

  2. Smith, William B., The Color Line, p.63.

  3. Landry, Stuart 0., The Cult of Equality, p. 315.

  4. Stoddard, Lothrop. The Rising Tide of Color, p. 300.

  5. Landry, Stuart 0., The Cult of Eguality, p. 316.

  6. Shannon, A. H., Racial Integrity, p. 94.

  7. Smith, William B., The Color Line, p. 70.

  8. Shufeldt, R. W., America's Greatest Problem: The Negro, p. 114. The distressing and horrible event which has been related above by Dr. Shufeldt and which is called a case of atavism is why the statement "one drop of Negro blood makes a Negro" is absolutely true.

  9. Thomas, W. H., The American Negro, pp. 408, 409, as quoted in: Shannon; A. H., Racial Integrity, p. 17.

  10. From a pamphlet entitled The Negro Disillusioned, written by Demps Alexander Oder of Childersburg, Alabama, in 1944.

  11. Congressional Record (Daily) March 8, 1944.

  12. Coody, Archibald, The Race Question (Vicksburg, Mississippi: Mississippi Printing Company, 1944), p. 23. The Race Question is Chapter VI of The White Chief, unpublished biography of James K. Vardaman, which has been written by Mr. Coody.

  13. Smith, William B., The Color Line, p. 38.

  14. Calvin, Ira, The Lost White Race, pp. 178, 108.

  15. Oden, Demps Alexander, The Negro Disillusioned, 1944.

  16. Landry, Stuart 0., The Cult of Equality, p. 318.

  17. Shufeldt, R. W., America's Greatest Problem: The Negro, p. 112.

  18. The Southern Watchman, April 3, 1943. p. 6.

  19. Birnie, W. A. H., "Black Brain Trust," The American Magazine, January 1943, p. 94.

  20. Embree, Edwin R., 13 Against the Odds, p. 1.

  21. From Miscegenation by D. G. Croly, as quoted in Landry, Stuart 0., The Cult of Equality, p. 315.

  22. Reprinted from What the Negro Wants, edited by Rayford W. Logan,by permission of The University of North Carolina Press. Copyright,1944, by The University of North Carolina Press.

  23. Landry, Stuart 0., The Cult of Equality, p. 314.

  24. Olden, Demps Alexander, The Negro Disillusioned, 1944.