Some years ago a so-called “prominent scientist” made a statement to the effect that the brains of people of various races had been examined anatomically and found essentially identical, and that this indicated that there were no essential intellectual nor emotional racial characteristics other than those caused by environment. Such statements are puerile or are made with intent to deceive....
This writer has heard pseudo-scientific sophistry to the effect that, since most deservedly prominent colored people have some white ancestry, mixing the races is desirable in order to produce more of these individuals. Such statements, too, are puerile and fraudulent.[559]
Other South Carolinians expressed similar opinions. Flora Bell Surles of Mt. Pleasant reported that ethnologists, whom she failed to name, had “shown” that the Negro race was “as yet ‘a childlike race.’” Gilbert Wilkes, also of Mt. Pleasant, described Negroes as belonging to a race which had “no history, or culture, or background of training in either social behavior or custom.” They were “only four generations removed from the trackless jungle” where they had lived “for countless thousands of years, without any development and in many cases without even having devised a language.”[560] Harold A. Petit of Charleston, vice-president and regional manager for the South Carolina Electric and Gas Company and past national president of Exchange Clubs, declared: “The Negro is irresponsible in every degree. I think it is a basic trait, although other conditions—environment, economics and education—contribute to his so-called lethargy.”[561]
A “Dirt Farmer” from “Rural South Carolina” expressed in the News and Courier the sentiments of the state’s most extreme racists. Conceding that segregation could not be “theoretically defended upon the basis of any code of ethics,” he nonetheless favored it because “like Hitler,” he believed “that the Aryan people are superior to any other who have yet trod the face of this earth during the period of recorded history, that they have the inherent ability to contribute more to the future well-being of mankind than any other.” What were the Aryan’s points of superiority, according to the “Dirt Farmer?” Their “curiosity: the desire to know for the sake of knowledge itself;” their “urge to reshape the world more to their own liking;” and their “seeking and finding newer and truer answers” to the problems of civilization. In the interest of impartiality he searched for points of superiority in the Negro. He could find only one—“a more highly developed sense of rhythm.” If the attributes of the Aryans were ever merged “with those of their inferiors, that fatal error can never be redeemed,” he concluded. Mankind’s slow progress would end “and the wave of the future” would push him “inexorably back into darkness and oblivion.”[562]
Logical inconsistency is the most striking characteristic of the many statements made in defense of racial segregation. The aforegoing pages have made this manifestly clear. But then who is logical when it comes to the question of racial superiority? Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and their like were living proof that logic really didn’t matter.
REFERENCES
CHAPTER I
[5] George B. Tindall, South Carolina Negroes 1877-1900, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1952), pp. 291-293.
[6] Ibid., pp. 54, 59, 73, 89, and 91. See also Tindall, “The Campaign for the Disfranchisement of Negroes in South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History, XV (May 1949), 212-34.
[7] Tindall, South Carolina Negroes 1877-1900, p. 303. See also Tindall, “The Question of Race in the South Carolina Constitutional Convention in 1895,” Journal of Negro History, XXXVII (July 1952), 277-303.