What was the attitude taken by this master race toward their benighted bondsmen? It was not simply that of indifference or neglect. There was nothing negative about it.
They began, at the first, a systematic ignoring of the fact of intellect in this abased people. They undertook the process of darkening their minds.
“Put out the light, and then, put out the light!” was their cry for centuries. Paganizing themselves, they sought a deeper paganizing of their serfs than the original paganism that these had brought from Africa. There was no legal artifice conceivable which was not resorted to, to blindfold their souls from the light of letters; and the church, in not a few cases, was the prime offender.[1]
Then the legislatures of the several states enacted laws and Statutes, closing the pages of every book printed to the eyes of Negroes; barring the doors of every school-room against them! And this was the systematized method of the intellect of the South, to stamp out the brains of the Negro!
It was done, too, with the knowledge that the Negro had brain power. There was then, no denial that the Negro had intellect. That denial was an after thought. Besides, legislatures never pass laws forbidding the education of pigs, dogs, and horses. They pass such laws against the intellect of men.
However, there was then, at the very beginning of the slave trade, everywhere, in Europe, the glintings forth of talent in great Negro geniuses,—in Spain, and Portugal, in France and Holland and England;[2] and Phillis Wheatley and Banneker and Chavis and Peters, were in evidence on American soil.
It is manifest, therefore, that the objective point in all this legislation was INTELLECT,—the intellect of the Negro! It was an effort to becloud and stamp out the intellect of the Negro!
The first phase of this attitude reached over from about 1700 to 1820:—and as the result, almost Egyptian darkness fell upon the mind of the race, throughout the whole land.
Following came a more infamous policy. It was the denial of intellectuality in the Negro; the assertion that he was not a human being, that he did not belong to the human race. This covered the period from 1820 to 1835, when Gliddon and Nott and others, published their so-called physiological work, to prove that the Negro was of a different species from the white man.
A distinguished illustration of this ignoble sentiment can be given. In the year 1833 or 4 the speaker was an errand boy in the Anti-slavery office in New York City.