(5) The Negroes on the farms often do well; but those are the old slaves.
(6) The young Negroes will not work on the land but drift off, probably to the cities.
(7) The pure Negro is much superior in character to the Mulattoes, who are the most vicious part of the race.
(8) The mulatto is physically weak and he is rapidly dying out.
(9) Five sixths of all the Negroes in this city have some white blood.
(10) The educated Negroes fill the prisons.
(11) Booker T. Washington has good ideas.
(12) Negroes must be “kept in their place,” otherwise there will be general rapine and destruction.
Some curious errors of perspective are discernible in this picture: the Negro is at the same time the best laborer and the worst laborer; the South continues to make great sacrifices to educate blacks who will not work and who fill the prisons; the mulatto is at the same time dying out and furnishing five sixths of the colored population of a large city. Such generalizations are the daily food of the South. Judge Norwood, of Georgia, on retiring from the bench of the city court of Savannah, where he had tried twelve thousand colored people, recently left on record his formal opinion that the Negro never works except from necessity or compulsion, has no initiative, is brutal to his family, recognizes no government except force, knows neither ambition, honor nor shame, possesses no morals; and the judge protests against “the insanity of putting millions of semi-savages under white men’s laws for their government.” The mayor of Winona, Miss., publicly announces that “The negro is a lazy, lying, lustful animal, which no conceivable amount of training can transform into a tolerable citizen.” Senator Tillman, of South Carolina, on the floor of the Senate has said: “So the poor African has become a fiend, a wild beast, seeking whom he may devour, filling our penitentiaries and our jails.” Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, in his farewell message to the Legislature, in January, 1908, called the Negroes, who are in a majority in his state: “A race inherently unmoral, ignorant and superstitious, with a congenital tendency to crime, incapable unalterably of understanding the meaning of free government, devoid of those qualities of mind and body necessary to self-control, and being unable to control themselves.”
One of the sources of confusion with regard to the Negro is that people speak of “the African Race” which they suppose to be pictured on the Egyptian monuments, to be briefly mentioned by Herodotus, and to be in the same condition now in Africa as it was when first described. 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. The truth is that the African tribes, with all their ferocity and immorality, had advanced farther in the path of civilization previous to their first contact with the Europeans than the North American Indians of the Atlantic and Mississippi regions; they had gone farther in the arts, had built up more numerous communities, and established a more complex society. The curse of Africa, from which the Indians were not free, was slavery and slave-hunting, which from time immemorial have led to ferocious wars and reckless destruction of life. On the side of religion, the African has built up a weird and emotional system, honeycombed with witchcraft and a belief in magic, stained with bloodshed and human sacrifice. Yet all explorers and residents in Africa find many attractive traits in the Negro; he loves a joke, makes a tolerable soldier, often shows faithful affection for his leaders, and under the supervision of white officials, seems capable of a peaceful and happy life.