Morant makes the point, in analyzing intelligence-test scores, that obviously white and Negro scores overlap. Consistently, the most superior Negroes will score higher as a group than the most inferior whites as a group. Moreover, the difference between the average scores of two racial populations may be quite small compared with the range of scores in either group. But even when this is so, says Morant, “there may be a marked difference between the relative frequencies in the population of individuals having extreme values of the measurement.” And this distinction may be important in the case of some mental characteristics: “There may be almost equal proportions of stupid, mediocre, and able people in two populations; even so, exceptional ability may be found with a frequency of 1 in 1,000 in one group, and of 1 in 10,000 in the other. Having a larger proportion of exceptionally able members may be a factor which tells decisively in favor of a population in the course of centuries or millenniums.”
The Liberal social anthropologists, to be sure, have denounced this reasonable hypothesis out of hand; and by effectively dominating the professional field, they have managed to elevate their own opinions to the status of truth, to promote speculation to the level of fact, and to convert surmise deftly into incontrovertible proof. I believe they have overdone it. They have lost their own case by their own disgraceful intemperance and intolerance of dissent; they protest too much; they cover up; they propagandize; they set out not to seek truth, but “to combat racial prejudice.”
At the same time, I would insert a comment that some of the more intemperate protagonists on the segregationist Right have fallen into the same errors of positivism and unqualified statement. They have tended to think too much in blanket terms—in literal blacks and whites—and they have regularly overestimated the factors of heredity and underestimated the factors of environment. Their position would be improved if they simply acknowledged that the question of the Negro’s innate inferiority has not been proved and hence is still open.
In terms of the problem immediately at hand, the question of whether the Negro’s shortcomings are “innate” seems to me largely irrelevant anyhow. The issue is not likely to be proved to the satisfaction of either side any time soon; it may not be susceptible of proof at all. Whether these characteristics are inherited or acquired, they are. And communities North and South (but especially in the South, and more especially still, in the rural South) must cope with conditions as they find them. The ruins of Zimbadwe are a long way from Prince Edward County, Virginia, and the finest analysis of electroencephalic findings among the Zulus is of small importance in teaching a class of Alabama sixth-graders. The arguments of anthropology are of interest to the South, and I would not wish to leave any impression that would minimize their importance; the fear of ultimate racial interbreeding, encouraged by prospective generations of desegregated and integrated school systems, is a very real fear in the South and not an imagined one. If these Negro characteristics are innate, the white Southerner sees nothing but disaster to his race in risking an accelerated intermingling of blood lines. And even if these Negro characteristics are not innate, the white Southerner wants no intimate association with them anyhow. And he is determined not to let his children be guinea pigs for any man’s social experiment.
VII
The second of the South’s principal arguments, related to anthropological considerations but of more immediate application, may be termed the argument of practicality: Even if it be true, as the liberal social anthropologists insist, that there is no innate cultural or intellectual inferiority in the Negro race as such, the plain fact is that here and now, there are immense differences in the educational achievements and apparent aptitudes of the two races; and these differences, especially in small rural communities, make true integration of public schools an impossibility. Beyond this, the educational needs of white and Negro children in the South, in terms of the lives they will lead and the employment they predictably will find, are quite different; and these differences, especially in the small counties, create formidable problems of curriculum. Finally, the temper, and prejudices, and feelings of the white taxpayers, who overwhelmingly bear the bulk of public school costs, simply cannot be discounted altogether; political realities have to be considered, and grave thought must be given, as a practical matter, to the social upheaval that inevitably would accompany massive desegregation of public schools in those areas of the South where Negro populations are greatest and traditions of racial separation are most deeply ingrained.
As Otto Klineberg points out in Characteristics of the American Negro, efforts to test the intelligence or the educational aptitude of Negro children go back a long way. In 1897, G. R. Stetson gave memory tests to fourth- and fifth-graders in the District of Columbia; the Negro pupils, who averaged a year and a half older than the whites, proved superior in memorizing three out of four stanzas of poetry. Truly is it said that the first shall be last and the last shall be first, for Stetson’s findings of 1897 represent one of the very few such inquiries in which Negroes have scored higher than whites. Since then, an exhaustive series of tests almost invariably have produced data pointing just the other way.
In 1913, A. C. Strong studied white and Negro school children of Columbia, S. C., and found the colored children mentally younger. The following year, B. A. Phillips reported on an analysis of twenty-nine white and twenty-nine Negro children who had been equated in terms of home environment, and found such a difference in mentality between the two groups that he wondered if they should be instructed under the same curriculum. In 1916, G. O. Ferguson tested white and Negro pupils of Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Newport News, Va., and found the superiority of the white group indubitable. In this same study he attempted further to classify the Negro subjects according to skin color (pure Negro, three-fourths Negro, mulatto, and quadroon), and found a plain correlation between higher scores and lighter skins.
Intelligence testing by racial groups was launched on a large scale with World War I. As an aid to military authorities, three separate tests were devised. The first, known as Army A, never was very widely used; it contained some four hundred items and featured two tests, of immediate memory and cancellation, which proved to be impracticable. Analyses of findings were made, however, by Ferguson and by Robert M. Yerkes, of 10,276 Negro soldiers and 38,628 white soldiers tested on Army A at Camp Lee and Camp Dix. The median score among Negro recruits ranged from 14.8 at Lee to 53 at Dix, the white recruits from 116 at Lee to 171 at Dix.
In an effort to devise a more useful test, a committee of five psychologists, led by Yerkes, was appointed by the American Psychological Association in April 1917. They put together tests that came to be known as Army Alpha and Army Beta. The tests, which brought together the most advanced psychological knowledge of their day, still are widely respected by psychologists forty-five years later. Henry E. Garrett, professor emeritus of psychology at Columbia University, has said of them that “owing to the size of the groups and the lack of special selection, the army test data yield probably the fairest and most unbiased comparison of Negro and white intelligence which we possess.”