Racial minority

“ Because the landmark decisions in this area arose in response to the continued exclusion of Negroes from the mainstream of American society, they could be characterized as involving discrimination by the "majority" white race against the Negro minority. ”

“ The aim is merely to make apparent and objective its place and importance in race relations, to indicate some of the ways in which it has developed; how it expresses itself, how it affects both the white and Negro groups; how, in its present state, it is strengthened, weakened, polluted, or purified by deliberate agencies or even by its own action, and finally how it may be used to reduce, if not to prevent, racial unfriendliness and misunderstanding. ”

“ We have consequently the present reaction—a reaction which says in effect, Keep these black people in their places, and do not attempt to treat a Negro simply as a white man with a black face; to do this would mean the moral deterioration of the race and the nation—a fate against which a divine racial prejudice is successfully fighting. ”

“ One may hazard the statement that the prejudice of America’s native white majority against the Negroes, the Indians, the Jews and the Asiatics, is now and has always been in some sense attributable and proportional to the majority’s fear of some action on the part of the minority which might injure the material interests of the majority, while the only race-differences which have had any real importance are those superficial ones which serve to make the members of the minorities recognizable at sight. ”

“ To the average American the most striking feature is this ‘appeal,’ aside from its attack upon Booker Washington, is its confession, virtually in so many words, that the theory of racial social equality is losing ground ‘everywhere in the United States.’ Thoughtful students of the American race problem long ago noted the steady spread of race instinct, or prejudice, into sections other than the South ”

“ 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. ”

“ Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas. Its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. ”

“ But, fortunately for the Negro and for humanity at large, we live now in an epoch when race malice and sectional hate are disappearing beneath the horizon of a brighter and better future. The Negro in America is free. He is now an acknowledged factor in the affairs of the continent; and no community, state, or government, in this period of the world's history, can afford to be indifferent to his moral, social, intellectual, or political well-being. ”

“ The denial of rights guaranteed the Negro by the Constitution and the refusal to grant him the ordinary privileges of a freeman have created what is called the “Negro Problem”—the most prominent, the gravest and the most important question in American affairs. Ten millions of people with African blood in their veins—“an undifferentiated part of the Nation”—are made the objects of the meanest discrimination and the most unjust treatment by a so-called superior race seven times their number. ”

“ 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 ”

“ That point concerns the biological breed of persons who should be selected by Negroes as leaders of their race. We risk the offense this time because efficiency in matters of racial leadership, as in other matters, should not be too tender to these points of prejudice when they stand in the way of desirable results. For two centuries in America we, the descendants of the black Negroes of Africa, have been told by white men that we cannot and will not amount to anything except in so far as we first accept the bar sinister of their mixing with us. ”

“ They have, for instance, sent a "questionnaire" to prominent colored men, consisting of fifteen questions, which with all their surface frankness and innocence seek to betray black folk by means of the logical dilemma of "segregation" and racial "solidarity." By subtle suggestion these queries say: If you believe in colored churches, why not in colored ghettos? Does not Negro advancement increase anti-Negro hatred? Are not Negroes prejudiced against whites? Are not the mistakes of Negro leaders manifest? ”

“ Once I had to telephone to the police to interfere, or I believe there would have been a riot.”
“I am told that in New York the white and black street-boys play amicably together.”
16“Yes,” said my host, “that is because the blacks are comparatively few. The tension increases in the direct ratio of the number of negroes.”
This I find to be essentially, if not quite universally, true. What is the inference? Is it not at bottom an instinct of self-preservation that spurs the South to inhumanity—an unreasoning, or half-reasoned, panic fear of racial submergence? ”

“ The struggle of the negro to rise out of his ignorance, his poverty and his social degradation, in consequence of the growth of these new forces and ideas within him, to the full stature of his American citizenship, has been met everywhere in the South by the active ill-will and determined race-hatred and opposition of the white people of that section. Turn where he will, he encounters this cruel and implacable spirit. He dare not speak openly the thoughts which rise in his breast. ”

“ The negroes are dividing into two distinct classes more decidedly, it seems to me, than any other nationality in our country; and I hope they will continue to keep and increase this distinction. A minority are improving, are taking advantage of education, are advancing in morality and industry, are acquiring property and becoming worthy citizens. These few are setting a standard, and are giving us hope of what the negro can and may become. The majority are not improving, but rather retrogressing. ”

“ We have been advised, if we really wished to benefit the slave and the colored race generally, not unnecessarily to shock the feelings, though they were but prejudices, of the white people, by admitting colored persons to our Anti-slavery meetings and societies. We have been told that many who would otherwise act in unison with us were kept away by our disregard of the feelings of the community in this respect.... ”

“ But in Southern communities, where the Negro is not outnumbered by many thousands of white people, the race problem, essentially, and in its most acute form, is something distinct from his laziness or ignorance, or brutality, or criminality, or all-round intellectual and moral inferiority to the white man. ”

“ Their reverses in this matter in the old slave-holding States, coupled with a vast mass of class legislation, modelled on the slave code, have affected the Afro-American people in their civil and political rights in all of the States of the Republic, especially as far as public opinion is concerned. This was inevitable, and follows in every instance in history where a race element of the citizenship is set aside by law or public opinion as separate and distinct from its fellows, with a fixed status or caste. ”

“ Are we therefore under the influence of prejudice? If we are, it is a prejudice which duty prompts us exercise. But we have bestowed more attention to this objection than it deserves. Nothing can be plainer than that the colonization scheme has had a great influence in weakening this prejudice against the blacks, and creating an interest in their behalf, which must, in the nature of things, continue to increase until the whole race shall be restored to an equality with the whites. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What to do with this class is a problem that perplexes the better element of Negroes, more, possibly, than it does the whites; since their shortcomings are generally credited to the whole Negro race, which is wrong as a fact and unjust in theory.
“This vicious element in the race is a constant subject of discussion in Negro churches and in private conversation. It is a mistake to say that crime is not condemned by the better class of Negroes. ”

“ However, into whatever causes they channel this mood, all recognize one common concept--the American Negro is a group with a heritage of suffering, taking action to force the white majority to recognize and fulfill its legal rights. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I commit this work to the public, white and black, to the friends and foes of the Negro, in the hope that the obsolete antagonisms which grew out of the relation of master and slave may speedily sink as storms beneath the horizon; and that the day will hasten when there shall be no North, no South, no Black, no White,—but all be American citizens, with equal duties and equal rights. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ With 30 per cent of the Negro population illiterate, with a criminal record double that of any of the emigrant classes above outlined, with the News Distributing Bureau against it, with no political or social standing—pariahs in the land—with Northern capital endorsing serfdom, with their inability to lose their race identity, on account of their color—we realize how heavy the odds were against the Negro race at that time. ”

“ But what, I would ask, is the great, the single object of all our meetings and societies? Have we any other object than to impress upon the community this one principle, that the colored man is a man? And, on the other hand, is not the prejudice which would have us exclude colored people from our meetings and societies the same which, in our Southern States, dooms them to perpetual bondage?"
In May, 1837, the Anti-slavery Women of America met in convention in New York. ”

“ With no wish to foster a spirit of lawlessness in this community, but actuated by a desire to see the negro keep in his proper place, we advise white men everywhere to stand up for their rights, and in no case yield an inch to the encroachment of an inferior race. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The great body of anti-Negro public opinion, preserved in the literature and traditions of the white race during the long, unhappy progress of the Negro from savagery through slavery to citizenship, has exercised a persistent and powerful effect, both conscious and unconscious, upon the thinking and the behavior of the white group generally. ”

“ A certain shade of complexion, though much lighter than some brunettes, consigned any one guilty of it to the grade of the blacks, which was de-gradation. We were educated to regard negroes as an inferior race of beings, not entitled to the distinctive rights and privileges of white men. Ignorance, poverty, and servitude came to be considered the birthright, the inheritance, of all Africans and their descendants; and therefore we did not feel the pressure of their bonds, nor the smart of the wounds that were continually given them.
Prejudice against color had become universal. ”