Chapter IX: Public Opinion in Race Relations (1)

The Negro in the United States: "A person of African blood (much
or little) about whom men of English descent tell only half the
truth, and because of whom they do not act with frankness and
sanity either toward the Negro or to one another--in a word,
about whom they easily lose their common sense, their usual
good judgment, and even their powers of accurate observation.
The Negro-in-America, therefore, is a form of insanity that
overtakes white men."--_The Southerner_ by Walter Hines Page.

The Stoic proverb, that "men are tormented by the opinions they have of things rather than by the things themselves,"[79] applies as aptly to the relations between the white and Negro populations as to other of our problems. Because the "race problem" has been so vaguely stated, so variously explained, and so little understood, discussions of it and the conduct of whites and Negroes toward each other usually express feeling rather than intelligence.

The public is guided by patterns of behavior and traditions generally accepted, whether sound or unsound. False notions, if believed, may control conduct as effectively as true ones. And pre-established notions lose their subtle influence when it appears that their basis is in error.

White persons are generally uninformed on matters affecting Negroes and race relations. They are forced to rely on partial and frequently inaccurate information and upon traditional sentiments. This same ignorance applies to Negroes, though not to the same degree; for they know white people in their intimate personal and home relations and in connection with their work in factories and stores. They read their books and papers and often hear their discussions. Negroes are perhaps more race conscious than whites because every day they must face situations which remind them of their race. They are sensitive to moods and antagonisms expressed in words and shown in manners. Their impressions from the white group are subject to distortion as are those received by the whites from them. Negroes manifest characteristics which, though the natural result of their circumstances and experiences, are yet misunderstood and often resented by the white group. For Negroes live and think in a state of isolation which is almost complete; and no white group understands it, or can fully understand it.

The riot of 1919 is an example of the effects of this isolation and misunderstanding. The accumulated resentments, unchallenged mutual beliefs and resultant friction, culminated in a surprising calamity and wholesale bloodshed.

This chapter, therefore, has a thesis and a purpose. If these beliefs, prejudices and faulty deductions can be made accessible for examination and analysis, many of them will be corrected. If a self-critical attitude toward these prejudices can be stimulated by typical examples, a considerable step will have been taken toward understanding and harmony.

The study of public opinion in race relations attempted by the Commission does not presume to set down definite laws of its working, or to tell all about how it works. 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.

The following plan is employed in presenting this branch of the subject:

1. Beliefs regarding Negroes, which greatly influence the conduct of white persons toward them, are described as they apply in the local environment, and their origin and background are traced suggestively to their responsible literature and circumstances.

2. Types of sentiment which are variants of these basic beliefs are presented with a view to making them intelligible, and to classifying them according to resolvable factors of misunderstanding.

3. Since personal attitudes and beliefs are molded by traditions and heritages apart from the exclusive influence of literature, material collected through intimate inquiry is presented objectively to describe the processes by which they appear to be created and to grow. Replies to a searching questionnaire on attitudes and opinions express the result of painstaking self-analysis.

4. Negro opinion on these same issues is described and illustrated with a view to making it intelligible. Their views are listed and their interpretations of current white sentiment are explained as far as possible.

5. From the subjective aspect the study then turns to the instruments by which these opinions are formed and perpetuated and the individual attitudes created. The following are deemed the chief agencies: (_a_) the press, (_b_) rumors, (_c_) myths, (_d_) propaganda. Conscious and unconscious abuse of these instruments of opinion-making is pointed out and explained.

6. Finally, means are suggested by which public opinion may, where it is faulty, correct itself, and employ its own instruments in the creation of wholesome sentiments among Negroes with respect to whites, and among whites with respect to Negroes.

A. OPINIONS OF WHITES AND NEGROES

I. BELIEFS CONCERNING NEGROES

Literature concerning Negroes has been written chiefly by southern students facing the problem in its most intense form and usually meeting the most backward of Negroes. Negro habits have been objectively explained and standards of judgment upon the entire group have usually been deduced therefrom. This constitutes the bulk of serious literature on the subject of the Negro; it is generally used in research into the problem.

In the North as in the South the assumptions regarding the Negro have their basis in similar sources. The beliefs, in general, are the same, though held by individuals in varying degrees. Though northerners do not believe so firmly and with such emotional intensity all that southerners believe about Negroes, yet they share these beliefs in proportion as they have been influenced or informed by southerners. It may happen, for example, that in a small northern town with but a handful of Negroes there is no discernible distinction in the treatment accorded them. The growth of the colony, however, can bring to the surface at first almost undiscernible shades of the usual beliefs, and finally the identical beliefs entertained by other communities.

There is, for example, no section of the country in which it is not generally believed by whites that Negroes are instinctively criminal in inclination. Some believe that they are criminal by nature and explain it as a result of heredity; some feel that it is a combination of heredity and environment; while others may feel that this inclination is due to environment alone. How, indeed, may the belief be avoided? Crime figures on Negroes are consistently unfavorable to any other conclusion. Students have gone so far as to accept without question these figures and proceed to explain that criminal tendency scientifically. This is also true as to low mentality, sexual immorality, and a long list of other supposed racial defects.

Below are presented some of the more important beliefs among whites about Negroes that have become crystallized by years of unchallenged assumption. They divide themselves into two general classes: (1) Primary beliefs, or fundamental and firmly established convictions which have, all around, the deepest effect on the attitude of whites toward Negroes. These are usually presented as revealed by statistics, authorities, and research. (2) Secondary beliefs, or the lighter modifications and variants of the supposed attributes of Negroes included in the more important assumptions.

1. PRIMARY BELIEFS

_Mentality._--The chief of these is that the mind of the Negro is distinctly and distinctively inferior to that of the white race, and so are all resulting functionings of his mind.

This view is held by some to be due to a difference in species, by others to more recent emergence from primitive life, and by others to be due to backwardness in ascending the scale of civilization. For this reason it is variously assumed as a corollary that the mind of the Negro cannot be improved above a given level or beyond a given age; that his education should be adapted to his capacities, that is, he should mainly be taught to use his hands. Thus a teacher in one of the elementary schools of Chicago finds that "colored children are restive and incapable of abstract thought; they must be constantly fed with novel interests and given things to do with their hands." Accordingly they are given handicraft instead of arithmetic, and singing instead of grammar.

In seeking the opinion of white trades unionists on the admission of Negroes to unions in Chicago, the Commission encountered in perhaps the harshest form the conviction that Negroes were inherently unable to perform tasks that white men did as a matter of course. A member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers felt that no Negro had, or could ever acquire, intelligence enough to run an engine. Employers frequently expressed the belief that Negroes are incapable of performing tasks which require sustained mental application. This view of their mental weakness appeared in the following statement made before the Commission by a school principal concerning her experience with Negro children:

So far as books are concerned there are set types of learning
which they take with great difficulty. Last Friday a colored boy
came to me and said, "I want to go back to the first grade." We
have gotten him in the third grade. He came to me and cried--a
great big boy--because he said the work was much too hard for
him, and he didn't want to study. His teacher was cross with
him and insisted he must get to work. It is an exception to
have a boy so frank. But I don't think the instance is far
from the truth. I have never had a white child complain that
he was graded too high and wanted to be put down. Sometimes
when they come in, they say to me: "I went to school in the
South, and I am in high fifth grade." "How long were you in
school in the South?" "Three sessions." Two months, and they
are in high fifth grade! I put them into the first or second
grade. Sometimes I can't fit them into the smaller grades, and
sometimes they resent it, but when they get into the actual
school work and find they can't do it, they can't complain. I
should say therefore that there is a certain amount of mental
backwardness found in colored children not found in whites.

A teacher in a Chicago public school said: "I believe like Dr. Bruner [director of Special School, Board of Education] that when a Negro boy grows a mustache his brain stops working."

A teacher in Moseley School said: "The great physical development of the colored person takes away from the mental, while with the whites the reverse is true. There is proof for this in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes."

_Morality._--Another of these primary beliefs is that Negroes are not yet capable of exercising the social restraints which are common to the more civilized white persons. Sometimes it is said that they are unmoral rather than immoral. This view, while charitably explaining supposed innate defects of character, places them outside the circle of normal members of society. Thus the assistant principal of a Chicago high school attended by Negroes said:

When it comes to morality, I say colored children are unmoral.
They have no more moral sense than a very young white child.
Along sex lines they don't know that this is wrong and that
is wrong--that wrong sense isn't a part of them. Of course we
say they are immoral and a white child doing the same thing
under the same circumstances would be. The colored and white
children here don't get mixed up in immorality; they are too
well segregated. Not that we segregate them: the whites keep
away from the colored.

This belief appears in statements that there is no family life among Negroes and but little respect, even in Chicago, for the ordinary decencies; when serious students of society speak of the promiscuity of colored women and men in sexual as well as social relations; and when social institutions assume the impossibility of locating the real father of children in a Negro family. Much public emphasis is given to the subject of venereal disease among Negroes, and certain deductions regarding this incidence of disease have resulted from comparative statistics.

_Criminality._--The assumption back of most discussions of Negro crime is that there is a constitutional character weakness in Negroes and a consequent predisposition to sexual crimes, petty stealing, and crimes of violence. Sexual crimes are alleged and frequently urged in justification of lynching. Popular judgment takes stealing lightly, because Negroes evidence a marked immaturity and childishness in it. It is supposed that they appropriate little things and do not commit larger thefts. Crimes of violence are thought to be characteristic of Negroes because crimes involving deliberation and planning require more brains than Negroes possess.

The president of a branch of the Illinois Federation of Women's Clubs thus explained the decision of that organization not to discuss the Negro question in its meetings:

Most of the presidents expressed themselves as against
discussion of the Negro question because as women's names
come out as being against the Negroes these women and others
of the club would have to live in fear of Negro men. A woman
must be careful not to put herself in a position of causing
them to have a grudge against her, as you know a white woman
has to fear a colored man.

A resident in an exclusively white residential district said:

Mother, sister, and I lived here alone and we had a car which
we kept in a garage in the back yard. Whenever we came in
at night we never used the back door, but always went around
front. Several times in walking up the back steps to the porch
we had been frightened by colored men sitting on the steps or
lying on the porch, and so we couldn't use that way into the
house.

Another white woman, in the course of a discussion of housing indicated this fear of Negro men:

When we came here this was a nice neighborhood. After some
years a colored family moved in, then two or three more, and
more and more, until you see what we have here now. I tell
you the white people right on this street have to be afraid
for their lives.

Another, living on Langley Avenue, near Forty-third Street, said:

I don't hold any conversations with Negroes. It's better to be
on the safe side when you've got grown-up daughters. I worry
a good deal about my two daughters as they go and come from
work, but they've never had anything happen.

The principal of a Chicago public school was questioned by a visitor concerning the attitude of white parents toward the association of their children with Negro pupils in that school. "The white parents are cautious about stirring up trouble," he said, "for they know the emotional tendency of the colored to knife and kill."

Petty thefts by Negroes, especially of food, are regarded as annoying evils most easily dealt with by a sort of half-serious firmness. A white resident of a district largely inhabited by Negroes said:

A white neighbor keeps chickens in her back yard. She gets the
burglar alarm from the hen house sometimes twice in a week,
and the running thief is always colored.... The colored buy
whatever they want; they'll spend their last cent and not
worry about the next day. If they want a chicken for dinner
and it's $1 a pound, they buy it or steal it.

_Physical unattractiveness._--Objections to contact are often attributed to physical laws which, it is said, make the sight or other sensory impression of the Negro unbearably repulsive. This attitude is found in protests against indiscriminate seating arrangements in street cars. The word "black" has long been associated with evil and ugliness, and it is not always a simple task to disassociate the idea from impressions given by a black man. Not merely is the color regarded as repulsive, but it is the further belief that Negroes have a peculiar and disagreeable body odor. A Christian Science practitioner in Chicago, giving her opinion of Negroes, had an idea that they carried a "musky odor," and were therefore to be avoided. A student at the University of Chicago and a resident of Hyde Park, talking with an investigator, said: "It is conceded that the Negro in Chicago must have some place to live, but to permit promiscuous distribution through scattered sections of the city would tend to increase the difficulties rather than mitigate them, partly because a white man would shrink from having a Negro live near him."

In the spring of 1919 there appeared in one of the Chicago daily papers a series of articles on the Negro question. In describing the relations between Negroes and whites in Chicago, the writer said:

A second phase of the situation, and the one that causes more
inutile railing than any other, is the crowding into the street
cars of colored people. Well, they must ride on street cars,
if only for the reason that most of them live remote from
their work. Even the North State Street line, that used to be
considered the special conveyance for "the quality," has come
to be known as the "African Central." If you can't stomach
it, you'll have to walk. They won't.

Living in neighborhoods infrequently visited by Negroes and where, as a general rule, their occupancy is effectively discouraged, some white residents occasionally express objections as based on a "natural physical opposition." Following is a typical statement:

I came here six years ago and there was a very noisy set of
white people living in the apartment house back of mine. Four
years ago the landlord put them all out and rented to colored
families. We were all up in arms then; but say, I never had
nicer, more quiet, and respectable neighbors. Their children
all behave well, and we can't kick. But at the same time, black
people aren't what one would pick out to have around--I guess
it's just because they are black.

_Emotionality._--This is commonly regarded as explaining features of conduct in Negroes, some of which are beautiful in their expression while others are ugly and dangerous. The supposed Negro gift of song is thus an accepted attribute of his emotional nature. So with his religious inclination. This same emotionalism is believed to lead him to drink and is frequently made to account for "his quick, uncalculated crimes of violence." The natural expression of Negro religious fervor is supposed to be noisy and frenzied. This view of the _Chicago Tribune's_ special writer is, roughly speaking, the view of thousands of Chicagoans:

I passed grand old stone churches, once the pride of rich and
powerful white congregations, whither I used to be sent as a
reporter not so many years ago, to hear some of the premier
pulpiteers of this town. They are colored people's churches
now, and beneath the arches, where a sedate gospel once was
expounded you hear today the jubilant yell of the dusky brother
who has found grace....

The service was, indeed, an incident in a three weeks' series
of revival meetings they have been holding at Olivet. The
principal performer was the Rev. S. E. J. Watson, a revivalist
from Topeka, a big man--mulatto, I should say, or perhaps
quadroon--with a powerful voice, a masterly platform style,
and enormous ardor. He spoke fluently, used no notes, and
demonstrated a free, wide skill in homely imagery, which,
however, included no slang nor vulgarities, but was racy
of the plantation and the cabin kitchen. His picture of God
"opening the front door of this good old world every morning
to let in the sun" was one of the most gorgeous flights in
primitive poetry I ever heard, and his narrative, accompanied
by the most vivid pantomime, of the Roman soldiers lifting up
the cross after they had nailed Jesus to it was hardly less
than terrifying--it certainly was terrific--in its sweep of
passion and its reality of detail.

And so he wrought them to a high emotional state. Many were
crying. Then came the direct personal appeal to "the unsaved,"
the threat of the everlasting fire, and the "lifting up" again
and again of the thought of the all-forgiving, all-saving Jesus.
The soft crying became heavy, convulsive sobbing. One by one
the unsaved who made the surrender to whatever it was that had
been holding them back, were led to the seats near the pulpit.
Those who did not surrender promptly were evidently in terrible
stress, or thought they were. They emitted shrieks that, truly,
made my heart stand still, and I would have trembled for the
sanity of the poor creatures except that I observed from the
corner of my eye that the "saved" in the assemblage took the
shrieks with perfect equanimity.

2. SECONDARY BELIEFS

In addition to the primary beliefs there are others supposedly not so serious or significant in their effects. These are usually modifications of primary beliefs, and are accepted as a consequence of frequent and almost unvaried repetition. In this manner these secondary beliefs have edged their way into the popular mind.

George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken in a recent volume, _The American Credo_, point out fairly striking instances of this tendency of the American mind. They have compiled a series of 435 commonly accepted beliefs covering a wide range. Among these 435 listed American beliefs there are some very real ones which involve and include the following popular notions about Negroes:

1. That a Negro's vote may always be readily bought for a
dollar.

2. That every colored cook has a lover who never works and
that she feeds him by stealing the best part of every dish
she cooks.

3. That every Negro who went to France with the army has a
liaison with a white woman and won't look at a colored woman
any more.

4. That all male Negroes can sing.

5. That if one hits a Negro on the head with a cobblestone
the cobblestone will break.

6. That all Negroes born south of the Potomac can play the
banjo and are excellent dancers.

7. That whenever a Negro is educated he refuses to work and
becomes a criminal.

8. That every Negro servant girl spends at least half of her
wages on preparations for taking the kink out of her hair.

9. That all Negro prize fighters marry white women and then
afterwards beat them.

10. That all Negroes who show any intelligence are two-thirds
white and the sons of U.S. Senators.

11. That the minute a Negro gets eight dollars he goes to a
dentist and has one of his front teeth filled with gold.

12. That a Negro ball always ends up in a grand free-for-all
fight in which several Negroes are mortally slashed with razors.

The most usual of these secondary beliefs which figure in the experience of Negroes and whites in Chicago are apparently of southern origin. This is due, not so much to any deliberate effort of southerners to infiltrate them into northern race relations, as that northerners largely regard as authoritative the experience of the South which holds almost nine-tenths of the total Negro population.

Some of the secondary beliefs are:

1. That Negroes are lazy; that they are indisposed to, though not incapable of, sustained physical exertion.

2. That they are happy-go-lucky; that their improvidence is demonstrated in their extravagance, and that their reckless disregard for their welfare is shown in a lack of foresight for the essentials of well-being. It is asserted that they do not purchase homes and do not save their money; that they spend lavishly for clothes to the neglect of home comforts and the demands even of their health; that they work by the day, and before the week is ended confuse bookkeeping by demanding their pay.

3. That they are boisterous. Hilarity in public places and especially in their own gatherings is thought to be common. They are considered as rude and coarse in public conveyances and are believed to jostle white passengers sometimes without thought and sometimes out of pure maliciousness.

4. That they are bumptious; that when a Negro is placed in a position of unaccustomed authority relative to his group he has an unduly exaggerated sense of his own importance and makes himself unbearable.

5. That they are overassertive; that constant harping on constitutional rights is a habit of Negroes, especially of the newer generation; that in their demands for equal rights and privileges they are egged on by agitators of their own race and are overinsistent in their demands; that they resent imaginary insults and are generally supersensitive.

6. That they are lacking in civic consciousness. Absence of community pride and disregard for community welfare are alleged to be the common failing of Negroes. It is pointed out that the "Black Belt" has been allowed to run down and become the most unattractive spot in the city. To this fact is attributed the tolerance of vice within this region. Negroes generally, it is still believed, can be bought in elections with money and whiskey. They are charged with having no pride in the beauty of the city, and with making it unbeautiful by personal and group habits.

7. That they usually carry razors. Whenever a newspaper reporter is in doubt he gives a razor as the weapon used. Some time ago a woman was found murdered in a town near Chicago. She had been slashed with a razor, and the broken blade was left beside her body. The murder was particularly atrocious, and the murderer left no other clew. Several Negroes were arrested on suspicion but were released when a white youth confessed the crime.

A Negro lawyer said:

During the riot a Negro was arrested for having a razor in his
pocket. I was his attorney, and the evidence showed that he
always shaved at work. After having shaved at this particular
time, he put his razor in his pocket and forgot it. He started
home and was accosted by two officers, who searched him
and found the razor. The judge heard the evidence and then
whispered to me that he was going to give the fellow ten days
because "you know your people do carry razors." He asked me
if I thought it all right and I said that I did not.

8. That they habitually "shoot craps." The Negro's supposed fondness for gambling is a phase of the belief concerning his improvidence. It is not unusual for whites, in conversation with any Negro whom they do not know well, when they wish merely to be friendly, to refer to dice. Employers frequently say that Negroes never keep money because as soon as it is earned it is thrown away on gambling with dice. The state's attorney believed that the riot of July, 1919, began over a beach craps game.

Negroes are believed to be flashy in dress, loving brilliant and gaudy colors, especially vivid red. Again, they are believed by white unionists to be natural strike breakers with deliberate intentions to undermine white living standards. Similarly they are believed to be fond of gin. Pauperism among them is believed to be unduly high, and they are thought to have no home life.

II. BACKGROUND OF PREVAILING BELIEFS CONCERNING NEGROES

Lying back of the current opinions about Negroes is a chain of circumstances involving the history of divers racial groups over hundreds of years. Slavery placed a stamp upon Negroes which it will require many more years to erase. Probably there would have been no doubt at all in the minds of Americans that essential inequalities existed between white and Negro had not their emancipation developed numerous unsuspected qualities. Thomas Jefferson is responsible for the observation that "a Negro could scarcely be found who was capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid." John C. Calhoun asserted that if a Negro could be found capable of giving the syntax of a Greek verb he would be disposed to call him human. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution fixed the Negro's status by law, and as soon afterward as his broader contacts with American institutions provided an outlet for more human participation, serious questions concerning his fitness for citizenship were put. The first studies that followed have been accepted for many years as the standard of judgment.

_Mentality._--Regarding Negro mentality, Dr. Jeffries Wyman, anatomist of Harvard University, about 1870, said: "It cannot be denied that the Negro and ourang do afford the point where man and the brute, when the totality of their organization is considered, most nearly approach each other."

As a corollary he adds:

The Negro may be a man and a worker in some secondary sense;
he is not a man and a brother in the same full sense in which
every Western Aryan is a man and a brother. To me the Negro
is repulsive.

The Negro is not yet a man and he is not yet a brother to the
white. It will take generations, no man can say how many, to
bring him to the level of supreme Caucasian man. He will have
to reduce the facial angle and he will have to have a more
spacious cranium before he can come into brotherhood with the
more advanced species of mankind.

Professor A. H. Keane, author of _Man Past and Present_, at least gave some sanction to the disposition to regard the Negro and Caucasian races as having nothing in common. To quote from his book, published in 1890:

No historic or scientific reason can be alleged why these
races, black or white, should be grouped together under one
appellation if by such name it is meant to convey the idea
that the human type can have any sanguinary affiliation. In
the Negro groups it is absolutely shown that certain African
races, whether born in Africa or America, give an internal
capacity almost identical of 83 cubic inches. It is demonstrated
through monumental, cranial and other testimonials, that the
various types of mankind have ever been permanent; have been
independent of all physical influences for thousands of years.

Dr. J. C. Nott, scientist and author of _Types of Mankind_ said:

It is mind and mind alone which constitutes the proudest
prerogative of man, whose excellence should be measured by his
intelligence and virtue. The Negro and other unintellectual
types have been shown in another chapter to possess heads
much smaller, by actual measurement in cubic inches, than the
white races; and although metaphysicians may dispute about
causes which have debased their intellects and precluded their
expansion, it cannot be denied that these dark races are,
in this particular, greatly inferior to the others of fairer
complexion.

This school of anthropology very clearly belongs to the period of slavery when it was necessary to rationalize the wishes of persons who, in order to treat Negroes as if they were mentally different, had first to convince, then justify, themselves in so doing.

Following them was another type of scientific writers who, while assuming that Negroes possessed brains, denied that they were like those of white persons or ever could be.

G. Stanley Hall thought that the Negro's development came to at least partial standstill at puberty. E. B. Tylor, author of _Anthropology_, assumed, from the accounts of European teachers who had taught children of the "lower" races, that after the age of twelve the colored children fell off and were left behind by the white children. Odum thought that the Negro child's mental development ended at the age of thirteen. None of these opinions, however, was the result of experimentation. A. T. Smith, author of _A Study of Race Psychology_, is responsible for the association and memory study of what he called a "typical" Negro boy of sixteen years. He discovered that "the Negro child is psychologically different from the white child, superior in automatic power but decidedly inferior in the power of abstraction, judgment and analysis." A. McDonald, author of _Colored Children--A Psycho-physical Study_, gave physical and mental tests in 1899 to ninety-one Negro children and concluded that dulness in colored children sets in between thirteen and sixteen. M. J. Mayo, author of _The Mental Capacity of the American Negro_, in 1913 studied 150 white and 150 colored high-school pupils in the schools of New York, and found the efficiency of colored pupils 76 per cent of that of the white. His selection included a large number of emigrants from the South, which, he explained, would increase the quality of the colored group, since only the more ambitious Negroes would seek to better their conditions by moving North. No account was taken of the defective school system of the South. Phillips made a study of retardation in the schools of Philadelphia and concluded that the course of study was not suited to Negroes, since colored children showed a greater degree of retardation than the whites.

Charles Carroll's book on the Negro points out by texts drawn from the Bible that the Negro is a beast created with an articulate tongue and hands in order that he may serve his white master. To bear out this theory Carroll's book says that man has been created in the image of God, but since, as everyone knows, God is not a Negro, it follows that the Negro is not in the image of God; therefore he is not a man.

There is a plain explanation of the origin of these beliefs. The science of anthropology itself has remarkably advanced during the past fifty years. When Negroes emerged from slavery, illiterate and unaccustomed to freedom, it was natural that their condition should be accepted as evidence that they could neither learn nor absorb the standards of the civilization around them. But although their illiteracy, for example, has decreased from 98 to 27 per cent, the original beliefs persist.

_Morality._--The reputation of Negroes for immorality is based largely on southern authority and is historically explained by reference to slavery, in which state immorality is asserted to have been common between the master and the woman slave. There are many authorities on this character trait. Perhaps the most pretentious study on this subject is by Howard O. Odum in "Studies in History, Economics and Public Law," Columbia University, 1910. It is called _A Study in Race Traits, Tendencies and Prospects_. Writing of immorality among Negroes, Odum says:

It has generally been assumed that the Negro is differentiated
by a distinct sexual development. It is affirmed that the
sex development crowds out the mental growth. It is affirmed
that the period of puberty in boys and girls is marked by
special manifestations of wildness and uncontrol. It is true,
too, that the practices of the Negroes leave little energy
for moral and mental regeneration. Their lives are filled
with that which is carnal; their thoughts are most filthy
and their morals are generally beyond description. Again,
physical developments from childhood are precocious and the
sex life begins at a ridiculously early period. But granting
these truths, it is doubtful if there is sufficient evidence
to warrant such a conclusion. The Negro reveals a strong
physical nature; the sex impulse is naturally predominant. But
its manifestations are probably no more violent and powerful
than are the expressions of other feelings already suggested.
The Negro's sensuous enjoyment of eating and drinking and
sleeping, relatively speaking, are no less marked than his
sexual propensities. Likewise lack of control and extreme
manifestations characterize the discharge of other impulses.
It is true, again, that the part played by sexual life among
the Negroes is large for a people; but to state that the
Negro is inherently differentiated and hindered by a sexual
development out of proportion to other physical qualities is
quite a different proposition. But whether the question here
raised is answered in the affirmative or not, it still remains
that in the practical life of the Negro his better impulses
are warped and hindered by his unreasonable abuse of sexual
license. And it is safe to suggest that the Negro need hope
for little development of his best qualities until he has
learned to regulate and control his animal impulses.

Statistics on illegitimate births and abortions are frequently quoted as evidence of Negro immorality. It is further asserted, with rarely an attempt at correction, that these immoral tendencies are responsible for rape and attempted rape of white women.

Tradition maintains that it is a part of Negro nature to desire a white woman and similarly a part of his nature to be lacking in those restraints and inhibitions which might control this desire. C. H. McCord, author of _The American Negro as a Dependent, Defective, and Delinquent_, said: "The average Negro is a child in every essential element of character, exhibiting those characteristics that indicate a tendency to lawless impulse and weak inhibition."

Numerous magazine articles and written studies in the South on this subject have given weight to this belief through sheer repetition. It is now not necessary to prove assertions or present an array of instances; they are taken for granted. Allusions to the "well-known immoral character" of the Negro or his instinctive tendency to commit sex crimes appear to carry as strong an impress of certainty as proved conclusions.

_Other supposed social characteristics._--Discussions of each of the characteristics mentioned and many others are found in the literature on the subject. It will suffice here to give selections typical of the trend of descriptions to indicate the manner in which the picture of the Negro in practically every phase of his life has been set. Of his industrial habits Odum, in the social study of the Negro, says:

In any discussion of the economic situation this (the question
of the efficiency of Negro labor) is an important consideration.
A portion of the Negroes wander about and seek to get a living
as best they can without working for it; they must necessarily
live at the expense of the other Negroes and the whites. The
number of vagrants in every community is surprisingly large.
They are naturally divided into several groups; those who never
work but wander from place to place, never fixed and without
a home, stealing, begging, and obtaining a living from any
source possible. Such men never work except when forced to do
so in little jobs or on the streets or in the chain gang.

Of the Negro's social affairs he says:

The description of one of these [Negro] dances would be
repulsive. The Negroes have "good times" on such occasions
and will go a long distance to attend. The whole trend of the
dance is toward physical excitation; they are without order
and the influence is totally bad.

Of the condition of the Negro's home:

It will be seen that there is little orderly home life among
the Negroes. Health conditions and daily habits are no better
than the arrangement of the house. Sometimes an entire family
consisting of father, mother, large and small children occupy
the same rooms. Nor do they ventilate, and especially when any
of the inmates are sick they are loath to let in the fresh
air. Physicians testify that three or four often sleep in a
bed together; they do not change clothing before going to bed
in many cases, and often go for many days without a change of
garments. It has been suggested that the personal habits of
the Negroes are filthy; such is the case. Filth and uncleanness
are everywhere predominant.

Of his religion:

In spite of pretentions and superficiality, there is nothing so
real to the Negro as his religion, although it is a different
"reality" from what we commonly expect in religion. The Negro
is more excitable in his nature, and yields more readily to
excitement than does the white man. The more a thing excites
him, the more reality it has for him....

The criminal instinct appears to overbalance any consciousness
which makes for righteousness, and the Negro has little serene
consciousness of a clean record; he is ready to rush at any
surprising or suspicious turn of affairs. The Negro does not
value his word of honor; he apparently cannot always tell
the truth. Only about one in every ten will keep an important
engagement made in seriousness.

The Negro's conception of heaven and hell, God and the devil
are very distinct. Heaven is an eternal resting-place where
he shall occupy the best place. He sings of his heavenly home
in striking contrast to his earthly abode. Perhaps for the
reason that the Negroes have little satisfactory home life,
they expect to have a perfect home in the next life.

Of his finer emotions:

While it is doubtful if there is enough evidence to warrant a
full statement concerning the affections of the Negroes, it is
apparently based on the gregarious impulse and upon a passive
sympathy rather than upon individual emotions intellectually
developed. The emotion is rarely of long duration.... The
Negro mother rarely mourns for her wandering child, or sits
up at night waiting for his return or thinking of him. The
father shows little care except that of losing a laborer from
his work.... The Negro has no loved ones. Numbers were asked
for the names of those whom they considered friends or whom
they loved or those who loved them. The question was put in
various ways with different subjects, but the returns were the
same.... But as a rule the Negro is without friendship among
his own people.

It may help to comprehend the range of conclusions found in the literature on the subject of Negro traits of character to note the array of descriptive adjectives employed, thus: sensual, lazy, unobservant, shiftless, unresentful, emotional, shallow, patient, amiable, gregarious, expressive, appropriative, childish, religious, unmoral, immoral, ignorant, mentally inferior, criminal, excitable, imitative, repulsive, poetic, irresponsible, filthy, unintellectual, bumptious, overassertive, superficial, indecent, dependent, untruthful, musical, ungrateful, loyal, sporty, provincial, anthropomorphic, savage, brutish, happy-go-lucky, careless, plastic, docile, apish, inferior, cheerful.

Much might be said of influences which have operated to counteract the opinion-making literature as to the utterly hopeless condition of Negroes. The object of this study, however, is not to attack these conclusions, but merely to cite them as indicating how certain attitudes detrimental to racial friendliness and understanding have had their rise.

In academic circles the more balanced opinions of anthropologists are gaining some headway. Franz Boaz, probably the foremost anthropologist in the United States, in _The Mind of Primitive Man_, maintains:

Our considerations make it probable that the wide differences
between the manifestations of the human mind in various stages
of culture may be due almost entirely to the form of individual
experience, which is determined by the geographical and social
environment of the individual. It would seem that, in different
races, the organization of the mind is on the whole alike,
and that the variations of mind found in different races
do not exceed, perhaps not even reach, the amount of normal
individual variation in each race. It has been indicated that,
notwithstanding this similarity in the form of individual mental
processes, the expression of mental activity of a community
tends to show a characteristic historical development.

This author in an article in the _Nation_ for December, 1920, comments thus on Lothrop Stoddard's book, _The Rising Tide of Color_:

Mr. Stoddard's book is one of the long series of publications
devoted to the self-admiration of the white race, which begins
with Gobineau and comes down to us through Chamberlain and,
with increasingly passionate appeal, through Madison Grant
to Mr. Stoddard. The newer books of this type try to bolster
up their unscientific theories by an amateurish appeal to
misunderstood discoveries relating to heredity and give in
this manner a scientific guise to their dogmatic statements
which misleads the public. For this reason the books must be
characterized as vicious propaganda, and gain an attention
not warranted by an intrinsic merit in their learning or their
logic.

Each race is exceedingly variable in all of its features, and
we find in the white race, as well as in all other races, all
grades of intellectual capacity, from the imbecile to the man
of high intellectual power. It is true that intellectual power
is hereditary in the individual, and that the healthy, the
physically and mentally developed individuals of a race, if
they marry among themselves, are liable to have offspring of a
similar excellence; but it is equally true that the inferior
individuals in a race will also have inferior offspring. If,
therefore, it were entirely a question of eugenic development
of humanity, then the aid of the eugenist would be to suppress
not the gifted strains of other races, but rather the inferior
strains of our own race. A selection of the intelligent,
energetic and highly endowed individuals from all over the
world would not by any means leave the white race as the only
survivors, but would leave an assembly of individuals who
would probably represent all the different races of man now
in existence.

Jean Finot, in _Race Prejudice_, says:

When we go through the list of external differences which appear
to divide men, we find literally nothing which can authorize
their division into superior and inferior beings, into masters
and pariahs. If this division exists in our thought, it only
came there as the result of inexact observations and false
opinions drawn from them.

The science of inequality is emphatically a science of white
people. It is they who have invented it and set it going, who
have maintained, cherished, and propagated it, thanks to their
observations and their deductions. Deeming themselves greater
than men of other colours, they have elevated into superior
qualities all the traits which are peculiar to themselves,
commencing with the whiteness of the skin and the pliancy of
the hair. But nothing proves that these vaunted traits are
traits of real superiority.

W. I. Thomas, in _Sex and Society_, concludes his discussion of relative mentality with this statement:

The real variable is the individual, not the race. In the
beginning--perhaps as the result of a mutation or series
of mutations--a type of brain developed which has remained
relatively fixed in all times and among all races. This
brain will never have any faculty in addition to what it now
possesses, because as a type of structure it is as fixed as
the species itself, and is indeed a mark of species. It is
not apparent that we are greatly in need of another faculty,
or that we could make use of it even if by a chance mutation
it should emerge, since with the power of abstraction we are
able to do any class of work we know anything about.

III. TYPES OF SENTIMENTS AND ATTITUDES

In the South the relations between the white and Negro races are determined by custom as well as law, which, however, permit the close personal relationships of family servants. In the North, when these relations become more impersonal and contacts are widened through change of occupation from domestic service to industry, these close personal ties are weakened. There is no established rule of conduct binding on whites and Negroes in their relations with each other; and although traditional beliefs may influence present relations in the North, they do not always dominate them. So it happens that there are to be found shades of opinion concerning Negroes varying from deliberate indifference to vituperative abuse of Negroes, whatever the subject, depending on one's beliefs about them. The selections of sentiment which follow are examples collected at random over the city--through interviews and discussions, from group publications, speeches and reports. They illustrate the real sentiments that white persons express when brought into contact with Negroes, or when their opinions are solicited.

1. THE EMOTIONAL BACKGROUND

_Hostile sentiment._--The refusal of Policeman Callahan to arrest Stauber, a white youth accused of throwing stones which resulted in the drowning of Eugene Williams, is regarded as the significant incident precipitating the riot of 1919 (see p. 4). Callahan was dismissed from the force, but reinstated. One year later, when questioned by an investigator for the Commission, he gave his racial philosophy freely in the following remarks:

So far as I can learn the black people have since history began
despised the white people and have always fought them.... It
wouldn't take much to start another riot, and most of the white
people of this district are resolved to make a clean-up this
time.... If a Negro should say one word back to me or should
say a word to a white woman in the park, there is a crowd of
young men of the district, mostly ex-service men, who would
procure arms and fight shoulder to shoulder with me if trouble
should come from the incident.

The following is from a letter written by a white employee of Albert Pick & Company:

Negroes in street cars refuse to double up with others of their
race, but seem to delight in sitting beside some dainty white
girl.

The Thirty-fifth Street cars are crowded by low-grade
"plantation niggers" who crowd on at Ashland Avenue via windows
and doors, then awkwardly step and fall over passengers; it is
maddening. About this time girls from Albert Pick & Company, the
Magnus Company, and the tailoring establishments are crowded
together breast to breast with Negroes. Often he falls asleep
and leans on his white seatmate's shoulder.

Laws should be urged preventing intermarriage.

Assaults upon white women are frequent, but hushed up by fear
of newspaper publicity, and the Negro is thus encouraged in
his felony.

In cases where a white girl is involved in an assault case
by a colored man, the white woman should be shielded, and her
name withheld from the newspapers and public, before and after
the trial. This will prevent race riots.

A movement is now afoot to declare a silent boycott against
employers of colored help.

A physician living on Oakwood Boulevard said: "The increasing amount generally of sex immorality is being contributed to by mixing Negroes and whites in schools and parks."

A teacher in the Felsenthal School said:

The colored people are coming from the South all the time,
for political purposes. It's propaganda for the colored man
to sit down by the white woman, and not to double up to make
room for the whites. Their papers tell them to do it. I was
the only white person in an empty car one day and a colored
man came in and took the seat beside me.

_Fear._--From _White Americans_ circulated in Chicago:

In the United States Negroes not only vote and hold office, but
the Negro vote is the deciding factor in the national elections,
and also in many of the northern cities, and they trade their
vote for jobs and offices and other privileges. The Negroes
control the great city of Philadelphia, and the press said the
Negro delegates at the Republican Convention in Chicago openly
offered to sell their support to the presidential candidate
who would pay the most money. Just think this thing over,
you sovereign United States citizens: the Negroes control the
elections, and thus your law-makers, judges, and officials;
and the Negroes have so much pull and confidence, that they
not only defend their political rights, but they start riots
and race wars, and openly threaten that they are going to make
the white folks stand around.

_Fear and pity._--A resident in the 6600 block on Langley Avenue said:

A colored family lives next door north of me, and you'll be
surprised when I tell you that I haven't been able to open my
bedroom window on that side to air that room for three years.
I couldn't think of unlocking the windows because their window
is so near somebody could easily step across into this house.
It's awful to have to live in such fear of your life.

When asked if she considered her neighbors so dangerous as that, she said:

Well, no, the woman seems pretty nice. I see her out in the back
yard occasionally and bid her the time of day out of charity.
You can't help but pity them, so I am charitable and speak.
Where the danger really is, is that you never know who's in
their house; they bring such trash to the neighborhood, even
if they are good and decent. How do I know what kind of people
this woman next door associates with? There's awful-looking
people sit on the front porch sometimes. Why, I couldn't sit
on my porch on the hottest day because I'd be afraid they
would come out any minute. And what white person will sit on
a porch next door to a porch with black ones on it? Not me,
anyhow, nor you either I hope.

_Hostile but resigned._--A resident near Dorchester Avenue and Sixtieth Street said:

I have nothing against the black man as a black man. He comes
into my place of business (drug-store) and I sell him. Not
many come in, as there aren't a lot of colored people around
Sixty-third and Woodlawn or Dorchester. But I don't want to
live with niggers any more than you or any other white person
does. People who say, "I like the colored people and don't see
why others can't get along with them" don't talk practical
common sense. Theoretically all this talk is all right, but
you get a white man of this sort to come right down and live
with a nigger and he won't do it.