Racial improvement

“ What are the racial endowments of these risen negroes whom we are urged by lofty example to invite into our drawing-rooms upon terms of broadest equality—for upon other terms would be a mockery—as eligible associates, companions, suitors, husbands for our sisters and daughters?—for a sensible father or brother does not admit white men to his home on any other basis. Of what essential racial elements and sources is the negro, risen and unrisen alike? ”

“ But who are the agents to bring about this grand change in the Negro race? Remember, just here, that all effectual revolutions in a people must be racial in their characteristics. You can't take the essential qualities of one people and transfuse them into the blood of another people, and make them indigenous to them. The primal qualities of a family, a race, a nation are heritable qualities. They abide in their constitution. They remain, notwithstanding the conditions and the changes of rudeness, slavery, civilizations, and enlightenment. ”

“ Why the Negro Often Fails
As I continued my inquiries I found that the leading coloured men in most cities, though they might be ever so discouraged over the condition of the ignorant, reckless masses of their [Pg 142] people, were awakening to the fact that the Negro’s difficulty in the North was not all racial, not all due to mere colour prejudice, but also in large measure to lack of training, lack of aggressiveness and efficiency, lack of organisation. In New York a “Committee for Improving the Industrial Condition of Negroes” has been formed. ”

“ For this is all that our intellects can do in the case of a racial problem—to help us to understand. The actual work of adjustment must be fought out or worked out; becomes, that is to say, a struggle to be settled by the contending races with forces more complex than the purely intellectual ones of argument and proof. Let us first consider, then, the conditions under which the relations between the black and white races were established in America. ”

“ Race prejudice is bound to give way before the potent influences of character, education, and wealth. And these are necessary to the growth of the race. Without wealth there can be no [Pg 552] leisure, without leisure there can be no thought, and without thought there can be no progress. The future work of the Negro is twofold: subjective and objective. Years will be devoted to his own education and improvement here in America. He will sound the depths of education, accumulate wealth, and then turn his attention to the civilization of Africa. ”

“ Second, A growing desire among the enlightened Negroes in America to learn all that is possible from research concerning the antiquity of the race,—Africa, its inhabitants, and the development of the Negro governments of Sierra Leone and Liberia, led me to furnish something to meet a felt need. If the Negro slave desired his native land before the Rebellion, will not the free, intelligent, and reflective American Negro turn to Africa with its problems of geography [pg vii] and missions, now that he can contribute something towards the improvement of the condition of humanity? ”

“ It is too late in the history of the world to go back to the idea of absolute racial segregation. The new African State would not involve any idea of a vast transplantation of the twenty-seven million Negroids of the western world, of Africa, or of the gathering there of Negroid Asia. The Negroes in the United States and the other Americas have earned the right to fight out their problems where they are, but they could easily furnish from time to time technical experts, leaders of thought, and missionaries of culture for their backward brethren in the new Africa. ”

“ A new racial consciousness is growing up leading to organisations for self-help; and while white prejudice [Pg 147] is increasing, so is white helpfulness as manifested in social settlements, industrial schools, and other useful philanthropies. ”

“ Organizations and associations for race betterment, heretofore assuming that the race issue must be settled in the South and not elsewhere, have given little attention to negro migrations, which have been haphazard affairs conducted along business and not along racial lines. With intelligent and sympathetic direction negro migration will be greatly accelerated ”

“ The prevalence, and pervasiveness, of racial discrimination might make the situation look hopeless, but we remain hopeful. Let us expose the racism and racial discrimination endemic to every society, around the globe. ”

“ Whenever the incentive to imitate the dominant race is removed the Negro or, for that matter, the Indian, reverts shortly to his ancestral grade of culture. In other words, it is the individual and not the race that is affected by religion, education and example. Negroes have demonstrated throughout recorded time that they are a stationary species and that they do not possess the potentiality of progress or initiative from within. Progress from self-impulse must not be confounded with mimicry or with progress imposed from without by social pressure or by the slaver’s lash. ”

“ Whatever merit this view possessed before the war of the Rebellion, it is obsolete under the present organization of society. The environments of the Negro, the downward tendencies of his social life, and the exposed state in which slave laws left him, have all perished. In addition to his aptitude for study and capacity for improvement, he is now under the protecting and restraining influences of congenial climate; and pure sociological laws will impart to his offspring the power of reproduction and the ability to maintain an excellent social footing with the other races of the world. ”

“ If, as stated, the ten millions of black people in the United States have excelled all the other groups of their race-type in moral and Christian growth, let us trace the cause, and in doing so we may get some light and information that will be of value in dealing with the Negro race in America and elsewhere, and in elevating and Christianizing other races. ”

“ Race lines must be obliterated at the South, and the old theory of the natural inferiority of the Negro must give way to the demonstrations of Negro capacity. A new doctrine must supplant the old theories of pre-slavery days, and every man in the Republic must enjoy a citizenship as wide as the continent, and, like the coin of the Government, pass for his intrinsic value, and no more. ”

“ The time for colored men and women to organize for self-improvement has arrived. Moral, social, and intellectual development, should be the main attainment of the negro race. Colored people have so long been in the habit of aping the whites, and often not the better class either, that I fear this characteristic in them, more than anything else. ”

“ Not many years ago, the United States of America was divided by a civil war on the question of the treatment, of the negro population. Even to-day, the colour problem in that country is so acute that a negro convict is in grave danger of being lynched. ”

“ The blood of all the ethnic types that go to make up American citizenship flows in the veins of the Afro-American people, so that of the ten million of them in this country, accounted for by the Federal census, not more than four million are of pure negroid descent, while some four million of them, not accounted for by the Federal census, have escaped into the ranks of the white race, and are re-enforced very largely by such escapements every year. The vitiation of blood has operated irresistibly to weaken that pride of ancestry, which is the foundation-stone of pride of race ”

“ Now, under the elevating and cherishing influence of the American Anti-slavery Society, the colored race, like the white, furnishes Corinthian capitals for the noblest temples. Aroused by the American Anti-slavery Society, the very white men who had forgotten and denied the claim of the black man to the rights of humanity, now thunder that claim at every gate, from cottage to capitol, from school-house to university, from the railroad carriage to the house of God. He has a place at their firesides, a place in their hearts—the man whom they once cruelly hated for his color. ”

“ These are the things that strike the thoughtful Negro as being dangerous, and these are the things that cause us who make up the Universal Negro Improvement Association to be fighting tenaciously for the purpose of building up a strong Negro race, so as to make it impossible for us to be exterminated in the future to make room for the stronger races, even as the North American Indian has been exterminated to make room for the great white man on this North American continent. ”

“ The truth is that the Negro on the land is doing well, far better than might be expected from people who have so little outlook and hope of improvement, working more intelligently and doing better than the fellahin of Egypt, the ryots of India, the native Filipino, quite as well as the lowest end of the Mountain Whites and the remnants of the lowland Poor Whites. It is a race-slander, refutable by any honest investigator, that the American Negro as a race is unwilling to work. ”

“ Not a few hold the view that the education and advancement of the Negro tends to create the race problem, and do not hesitate to say that if the Negroes could only be kept as laborers in the cotton and rice and sugar fields, in the furnaces and mines of the South, aspiring to nothing higher and not antagonizing the whites in political matters, there would be no race problem. ”

“ The racial antipathy felt by the alien whites, along with their cultural repugnance and economic apprehensions, intrenched the negroes permanently in the situation. The most fertile Southern areas when once converted into black belts tended, and still tend as strongly as ever, to be tilled only by inert negroes, the majority of whom are as yet perhaps less efficient in freedom than their forbears were as slaves. ”

“ We believe that the first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races—commonly called the Negro Problem—lies in the correction of the immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage from slavery. We believe that only earnest and long continued efforts on our own part can cure these social ills. ”

“ Laying aside all prejudice in favor of or against race, looking at the negro as politically and socially related to the American people generally, and measuring the forces arrayed against him, I do not see how he can survive and flourish in this country as a distinct and separate race, nor do I see how he can be removed from the country either by annihilation or expatriation. ”

“ The relationship between those figures and the history of unequal treatment afforded to the Negro cannot be denied. At every point from birth to death, the impact of the past is reflected in the still disfavored position of the Negro.
In light of the sorry history of discrimination and its devastating impact on the lives of Negroes, bringing the Negro into the mainstream of American life should be a state interest of the highest order. ”

“ There are those among the white race and those among the black race who assert, with a good deal of earnestness, that there is no difference between the white man and the black man in this country. This sounds very pleasant and tickles the fancy; but, when the test of hard, cold logic is applied to it, it must be acknowledged that there is a difference,—not an inherent one, not a racial one, but a difference [Pg 32] growing out of unequal opportunities in the past. ”

“ Therefore, if the negro will insist upon some race manipulation in order to raise the average of intelligence, thrift and morality in our national citizenship, the only safe and sane method is to take measures to restrict the increase of the negro race and let it die out like the Indian. ”

“ They do not even camouflage the racial barricade which they have erected; they purposely expose it in its nakedness to full view, so that none may fail to see it. The dark natives maintain their tribal and racial frontiers by their inherited organizations, but the surveillance of the social barrier between them and the whites lies with the dominant race. ”

“ Phillis Wheatley has been mentioned already. So, in the midst of darkness and oppression, the Negro race in America, without the use of the Christian church, schoolhouse, or printing-press, produced a poetess, an astronomer, a mathematician, and a physician, who, had they been white, would have received monuments and grateful memorials at the hands of their countrymen. But even their color cannot rob them of the immortality their genius earned. ”

“ It is of the first importance that old prejudices against the Negroes, based upon their misfortunes and not on their faults, be supplanted with respect, encouragement, and co-operation, and with a recognition of their heroic struggles for self-improvement and of their worthy achievements as loyal American citizens. ”

“ Judged by the standards which the white man most readily applies to himself—namely, the proportion of educated and [Pg 139] progressive men and women, the average amount of property, the interest in the welfare of the race—there is no reason to doubt that the Negro is higher up than he was half a century ago.
How far does the desire for uplift extend, and how far is it effective? The negro population shows a distinct interest in the future of the race. ”