Razzia

“ Britons and Scythians were the fellow-slaves of the Ethiopian: but at last all the other nations of the earth seemed to conspire against the negro race, agreeing never to enslave each other, but to make the blacks the slaves of all alike. Thus, this race of human beings has been singled out, whether owing to the accident of color, or to their peculiar fitness for certain kinds of labor, for infamy and misfortune; and the abolition of the practice of promiscuous slavery in the modern world, was purchased by the introduction of a slavery confined entirely to negroes. ”

“ Now the following are truths which a knowledge of the history of the world, and particularly of that of our own country, compels us to know — that the African negro race never have been acknowledged as belonging to the family of nations ”

“ Colonization has taken the negro from under his disabilities here, and placed him where he has developed to an intellectual and moral stature never reached before by his race, and now holds him up as the optical demonstration of what the negro may easily become. Whole nebula of phrenological speculations and scientific infidelities have thus been dissipated; and there, star-like, shines out the negro intellect, clear and bright. There, intelligence, freedom, and religion, flourish amongst the descendants of Ham—amidst the much maligned Ethiopian race. ”

“ The Northern man does not, I assure you, love the black man, and never dreams of lifting him up to equality with the Anglo-Saxon race; and when he says, "I would not own a slave," he means, that he could not tolerate negroes near him, and would not, on any account, endure the vexation and trouble of taking care of them. Did you ever hear an instance of a Northern man marrying a rich Southern girl, and then magnanimously giving up all her property in slaves, for the sake of his love to the black race, or of the abstract principle of freedom? ”

“ It was forgetfulness of God, idolatry! "Righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is a reproach to any people."
The Negro tribes of Africa are as widely separated by mental, moral, physical, and social qualities as the Irish, Huns, Copts, and Druids are. Their location on the Dark Continent, their surroundings, and the amount of light that has come to them from the outside world, are the thermometer of their civilization. It is as manifestly improper to call all Africans Negroes as to call, Americans Indians. ”

“ 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 in our examination of African tribes we shall not confine ourselves to that class of people known as Negroes, but call attention to other tribes as well. And while, in this country, all persons with a visible admixture of Negro blood in them are considered Negroes, it is technically incorrect. For the real Negro was not the sole subject sold into slavery: very many of the noblest types of mankind in Africa have, through the uncertainties of war, found their way to the horrors of the middle passage, and finally to the rice and cotton fields of the Carolinas and Virginias. ”

“ That the Negro race in Africa has never, by its own initiative, risen much above barbarism, although it has been exposed to a considerable range of environments and has had abundant time in which to bring to expression any inherited traits it may possess.
2. That when transplanted to a new environment—say, Haiti—and left to its own resources, the Negro race has shown the same inability to rise; it has there, indeed, lost most of what it had acquired from the superior civilization of the French. ”

“ So far from being equal to us, the polished inhabitants of Europe, as some ignorant people suppose, they are immeasurably below the Africans themselves,
"The typical Negro is the true savage of Africa; and I must paint the deformed anatomy of his mind, as I have already done that of his body.
"The typical Negroes dwell in petty tribes, where all are equal except the women, who are slaves; where property is common, and where, consequently, there is no property at all; where one may recognize the Utopia of philosophers, and observe the saddest and basest spectacles which humanity can afford. ”

“ My heart burns with indignant feeling when I see that the poor foolish negro is seduced from his master, and brought to our Northern cities, or smuggled into Canada, where he is alike despised and deserted, and left to famish, or exist in a place so small and filthy that our cows could not survive a winter in them. I have obtained a statistical pamphlet, printed by highly respectable gentlemen in Philadelphia, that reveals the hopeless desolation, and the agonizing sufferings, of the miserable, degraded classes of negroes in that city. ”

“ The Negro Problem.—Not a few persons look upon the negro problem as the most serious social [330] question in America. Whatever its relative merits, as compared with other problems, it is sufficiently serious to call for careful study and an attempt at solution. The negro race in America numbers approximately ten millions, twice as many as at the close of the Civil War. The negro was thrust upon America by the cupidity of the foreign slave-trader, and perpetuated by the difficulty of getting along without him. ”

“ Now that years have rolled by and the Universal Negro Improvement Association has made the circuit of the world with its propaganda, we find eminent statesmen and leaders of the white race coming out boldly advocating the cause of colonizing Africa with the Negroes of the western world. ”

“ 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? ”

“ We need not go so far away from home, indeed, to see little black children with woolly, kinky hair and flat noses like the little African. In the sunny South of our own land are many negro children as like the little negro cousin in Africa as one pea is like another. Years and years ago slave-ships brought to this country negroes, stolen from their own African homes to be the slaves and servants of the white people here. ”

“ For the similarity of suffering has produced in all lands where whites rule colored races a certain similarity of sentiment, viz.: a racial revulsion of racial feeling. The peoples of those lands begin to feel and realize that they are so subjected because they are members of races condemned as “inferior” by their Caucasian overlords. The fact presented to their minds is one of race, and in terms of race do they react to it. Put the case to any Negro by way of test and the answer will make this clear. ”

“ The Negro tribes of Africa have frequently been supposed to belong to an inferior race of Men, an opinion founded—partly on an inadequate conception of the progressive character of the Human species—partly on ignorance of the progress which many Negro nations have actually made. ”

“ The Negro race, however, it must be remembered, is the only race that has ever come in contact with the European race, and been able to withstand its atrocities and oppression; all others, like the Indian, whom they could not make subservient to their use, they have destroyed. The Negro race, like the Israelites, multiplied so rapidly in bondage, that the oppressor became alarmed, and began discussing methods of safety to himself. ”

“ He argues: “The white man hates you; hate him. Trade with Negro storekeepers; employ Negro doctors; don’t go to white dentists and lawyers.”
Out of this condition proceed two tendencies. The first is the natural result of mutual fear and suspicion, and that is, a rapid flying apart of the races. All through my former chapters I have been showing how the Negroes are being segregated. So are the Chinese segregated, and the blacks in South Africa, and certain classes in India. Parts of the South are growing blacker. ”

“ Prominent among them in this pride of race stands the subject of this work.
At a recent session of Congress an interrogatory was raised by a member of that honorable body, while the suffrage question was being agitated: “What negro, either ancient or modern, has risen up and shown his claims to a family lineage, or a kingdom, as have done other men through all times? Or where is the negro, who, by the force of his intellect, and might of his will and power, has attempted to bring together the scattered petty chiefdoms south of the Sahara into one grand consolidated kingdom? ”

“ As in India, in China, in Egypt, Ireland, Russia, Bohemia, Palestine and Mexico, we are witnessing the resurgence of a people: it has aptly been said,—"For all who read the signs aright, such a dramatic flowering of a new race-spirit is taking place close at home—among American Negroes." ”

“ That the severities of the African slave trade, and the horrors of Negro slavery, as exhibited in European colonies and possessions, are entirely modern—confined to a short period in the history of the world, and therefore not a true exemplification of the general condition of the Negro race. ”

“ The South's assumption was that the negro was intrinsically an inferior and must be kept subordinate to the [Pg 356] white man. The North, in its management of political reconstruction, had practically assumed that the negro was the equal of the white man and was so to be treated. There was a third view of the matter,—that the negro was at an inferior stage of manhood, and the necessary task was to develop him. He is a man, but an imperfect man,—make him a whole man. ”

“ It is to the establishment of this point that all men look to decide the dispute, whether negro races are to remain forever degraded or not. Time and patience, however, and much kind watchfulness, may be required before this experiment be deemed conclusive. Let many failures be anticipated ere a certain result is secured. Let no higher claims be made on the negro than on other races. Would a colony [Pg 206] of Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, Sicilians, if left to themselves, offer a fairer prospect of success than Liberia now offers? ”

“ My third and greatest objection to the Colonization Society is, that its members write and speak, both in public and private, as if the prejudice against skins darker colored than our own, was a fixed and unalterable law of our nature, which cannot possibly be changed. The very existence of the Society is owing to this prejudice: for if we could make all the colored people white, or if they could be viewed as impartially as if they were white, what would be left for the Colonization Society to do? ”

“ But it powerfully tends to veil the existing and outrageous atrocity of negro slavery; and it corroborates against the people of color, whether enslaved or free, one of the most base, groundless, and cruel prejudices, that has ever disgraced the powerful, or afflicted the weak. ”

“ In few respects could the Negroes do so much good for themselves as by helping in the detection of the crime of their own people.
If Negroes are violent to Whites and among themselves, they follow an example daily and hourly set them by the members of the Superior Race. In the first place, the Negro listens habitually to rough and humiliating language. You get a new view of race relations when a planter in his store on Saturday night calls up for you one after another three specimen Negroes. “This man Chocolate,” he says, “is a full-blooded nigger, the real thing.” ”

“ In the United States the whites outnumber the blacks roughly ten to one. Our coloured population represents the evolution of the one-time African slave through various generations into a peaceful, law-abiding, and useful social unit. The Southern "outrage" is the rare exception. We have produced a Frederick Douglass and a Booker Washington. Our Negro is a Christian, fills high posts, and invades the professions. ”

“ The negro problem, in other words, is not greatly different from what it would be if the present negroes were descendants of savage aborigines that had peopled this country before the white man came. The problem of the negro and of the Indian, and of all the uncivilized races, is essentially the same. ”

“ Rankin, a highly intelligent traveller, who reports accurately and without prejudice the results of his personal observation, has recently given a similar testimony in regard to some of the numerous tribes of northern Negro-land, who frequent the English colony of Sierra Leone. In the skull of the more improved and civilized nations among the woolly-haired blacks of Africa, there is comparatively slight deviation from the form which may be looked upon as the common type of the human head. ”

“ As a matter of fact, there are several native races, varying in color from the intensely black and uncouth Guinea Negro of the West Coast to the olive-brown Arabs of the Sahara desert, and in civilization from the primitive dwarf tribes of Central Africa to the organized kingdoms of the Zulus and the thriving states of the Central lake region. Many arguments as to the negro character are based upon the supposed profound barbarism and cannibalism of all Africa. ”