Professor A. H. Keane, author of Man Past and Present, at least gave some sanction to the disposition to regard the Negro and Caucasian races as having nothing in common. To quote from his book, published in 1890:
No historic or scientific reason can be alleged why these races, black or white, should be grouped together under one appellation if by such name it is meant to convey the idea that the human type can have any sanguinary affiliation. In the Negro groups it is absolutely shown that certain African races, whether born in Africa or America, give an internal capacity almost identical of 83 cubic inches. It is demonstrated through monumental, cranial and other testimonials, that the various types of mankind have ever been permanent; have been independent of all physical influences for thousands of years.
Dr. J. C. Nott, scientist and author of Types of Mankind said:
It is mind and mind alone which constitutes the proudest prerogative of man, whose excellence should be measured by his intelligence and virtue. The Negro and other unintellectual types have been shown in another chapter to possess heads much smaller, by actual measurement in cubic inches, than the white races; and although metaphysicians may dispute about causes which have debased their intellects and precluded their expansion, it cannot be denied that these dark races are, in this particular, greatly inferior to the others of fairer complexion.
This school of anthropology very clearly belongs to the period of slavery when it was necessary to rationalize the wishes of persons who, in order to treat Negroes as if they were mentally different, had first to convince, then justify, themselves in so doing.
Following them was another type of scientific writers who, while assuming that Negroes possessed brains, denied that they were like those of white persons or ever could be.
G. Stanley Hall thought that the Negro's development came to at least partial standstill at puberty. E. B. Tylor, author of Anthropology, assumed, from the accounts of European teachers who had taught children of the "lower" races, that after the age of twelve the colored children fell off and were left behind by the white children. Odum thought that the Negro child's mental development ended at the age of thirteen. None of these opinions, however, was the result of experimentation. A. T. Smith, author of A Study of Race Psychology, is responsible for the association and memory study of what he called a "typical" Negro boy of sixteen years. He discovered that "the Negro child is psychologically different from the white child, superior in automatic power but decidedly inferior in the power of abstraction, judgment and analysis." A. McDonald, author of Colored Children—A Psycho-physical Study, gave physical and mental tests in 1899 to ninety-one Negro children and concluded that dulness in colored children sets in between thirteen and sixteen. M. J. Mayo, author of The Mental Capacity of the American Negro, in 1913 studied 150 white and 150 colored high-school pupils in the schools of New York, and found the efficiency of colored pupils 76 per cent of that of the white. His selection included a large number of emigrants from the South, which, he explained, would increase the quality of the colored group, since only the more ambitious Negroes would seek to better their conditions by moving North. No account was taken of the defective school system of the South. Phillips made a study of retardation in the schools of Philadelphia and concluded that the course of study was not suited to Negroes, since colored children showed a greater degree of retardation than the whites.
Charles Carroll's book on the Negro points out by texts drawn from the Bible that the Negro is a beast created with an articulate tongue and hands in order that he may serve his white master. To bear out this theory Carroll's book says that man has been created in the image of God, but since, as everyone knows, God is not a Negro, it follows that the Negro is not in the image of God; therefore he is not a man.
There is a plain explanation of the origin of these beliefs. The science of anthropology itself has remarkably advanced during the past fifty years. When Negroes emerged from slavery, illiterate and unaccustomed to freedom, it was natural that their condition should be accepted as evidence that they could neither learn nor absorb the standards of the civilization around them. But although their illiteracy, for example, has decreased from 98 to 27 per cent, the original beliefs persist.
Morality.—The reputation of Negroes for immorality is based largely on southern authority and is historically explained by reference to slavery, in which state immorality is asserted to have been common between the master and the woman slave. There are many authorities on this character trait. Perhaps the most pretentious study on this subject is by Howard O. Odum in "Studies in History, Economics and Public Law," Columbia University, 1910. It is called A Study in Race Traits, Tendencies and Prospects. Writing of immorality among Negroes, Odum says: