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.