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.