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.