He was described as a creature with "mental constitution very similar to that of the child, on a lower evolutionary plane than the white man, and more closely related to the highest anthropoids." His brain weight, we were told, was 35 ounces as compared with the gorilla's 20 ounces and the Caucasian's 45.
In America, conception of the Negro has ever fluctuated in direct ratio to the rise and fall of military domination of the affairs of the republic. Whenever the military agencies of the government have been exalted, the Negro has been benefited by reaction of the public mind. From 1865 to 1870 exaltation of the military element of American life brought along not only emancipation of the black man, but that conception of him which resulted in the conferring of manhood rights and privileges. In this short space of five years, so highly had the Negro come into public estimation that, with the protection of the military arm of the government, there were actively engaged in his interest an Emancipation League, a Freedmen's Pension Society, a Freedmen and Soldiers' Relief, a Freedmen's Aid Society of the M.E. Church, a Society of Friends of Great Britain and Ireland for the Relief of Emancipated Slaves of America, an American Missionary Association, a Freedmen's Bureau, a Freedmen's Bank, a British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, an American Negro Aid Commission, and other organizations, too numerous for mention. So important, however, was military organization and predominance to the success of any one of these organizations, that Carl Schurz, reporting to Congress the condition of the South, declared: "If the national government firmly and unequivocally announces its policy not to give up the control of free labor reform until it is firmly accomplished, the progress of the reform will be far more rapid and far less difficult than it will be if the attitude of the government is such as to permit contrary hopes to be indulged in."
In 1870, as the military power of the United States weakened its control over the nation, forces of opposition arose to pull down to the depths the black man, who had been exalted by the agencies of military government. The Ku Klux Klan, headed by the Grand Wizard of the Invisible Empire, and the Grand Dragon of the Realm, with malignant fanaticism worshipped the lost cause. Hatred of white man for Negro, accentuated and embittered by hatred for the Yankee carpet-bagger and the southern scalawag, resulted in the rise of a powerful southern partisanship, stunned only so long as military power held sway. Peonage took place of colored free labor. Disproportionate appropriation of taxes between blacks and whites lowered the Negro measurably year by year. With the complete removal of military supremacy, the Ku Klux courted publicity which it had hitherto shunned. A leader, the statesman of the new era, in the person of the late Benjamin R. Tillman, of South Carolina, appeared. He split the loose organization of southern aristocracy with the blacks with lily white wedge, and trampled into dust every agency which favored the black man. He deprived the black of all weapons of offence or defence, disfranchised him, shunted him off into the ghetto, and called the world to mock him in his lowly position. This southern statesman lived to see the Solid South come into national power in 1912. From that time, until the beginning of the world war in 1914, the American negro reached the lowest point of his political and social status.
Compared with Anglo-Saxon, Frenchman, Italian, Austrian, German or Russian, he was of an order and degree reputed farthest down. No celebrity attached to his menial state. No distinction might be his as an award from the courts of nations. Dignity, grandeur and majesty applied to Guelphs, Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns. Theirs was all arrogation of supereminence. And to them all, the Negro, throughout the world, was, if a man at all, pre-eminently the mere Man Friday.
From such a status of debasement, existing in an intolerable atmosphere of derogation and disrepute, the humble and humiliated American Negro sought the exaltation of international honor. Denied and disavowed at home, through vicissitude of international war, he hoped for affirmation of a new world dictum in acknowledgment of his human qualities and worth. He did not, like Toussaint, long for the high honors of the continental emperor. He sought democratic equality, and he would as lief think of bringing the Kaiser to his level as exalting himself to the plane of that immortal celebrity.
He wanted to make good in public. He wanted to demonstrate both efficiency and initiative. He desired that popular belief conceive him as a man, not a monkey. He wished the Caucasian world to take into its head that he might function as a valuable and serviceable element of twentieth century civilization. He yearned to reveal his powers in every field of endeavor. And he expected that when the Caucasian had arrived at a fair judgment in his behalf, he would issue to him the warrant certifying that he was four-square with the dominant opinion of mankind, and, therefore, entitled to the honors of superior status.
He aimed to compensate the world by presenting a concept of beauty in place of a general notion of repellent ugliness. Instead of being regarded as a "Hottentot with clicking palate, whom the meanest of the rest look down upon for all his glimmering language and spirituality," he wished the world to find in him fitness for survival, conformity with civilization's ideal, example of the world philosophy of forbearance, human relationships, symmetry and poise in adaptation to the world's tasks, and moderation in respect of the higher laws, whose harmonies order and rectify all creation.
He sought to neutralize the misteachings of Adam Smith, of Darwin and Defoe. Smith's "Wealth of Nations" presumed the material debasement of darker peoples of colonial populations, or, in lieu thereof, such debasement of Slav, Serf or Serbian as would compensate the vanity of the superior people. Indirectly, Darwin taught, that the Negro closely approached the missing link between the savage beast and the human. Defoe delighted the world with a picture of the ideal economic status for the maintenance of white superiority over black man. These ideas the Negro wished to topple over.
He felt it necessary to repudiate the indoctrination of racial hatred proclaimed throughout the world by "The Birth of a Nation." He set over against it the reception by all civilization of the Booker T. Washington life story. He wished to substitute recognition of worth in place of the things that debase and make ashamed.
His great puzzle was the Anglo-Saxon, cold, austere and uncomplaisant. This Caucasian, fair of skin, with smooth and wavy hair, small cheekbones and elevated forehead, appeared a worshipful master whose station, under God, was of preordained and predestined eminence. Occupying Eurasia from the Channel to the Ganges, together with the most favored portions of Africa and America, he was the author and agency for law and order for the world. St. Augustine, first archbishop and lawgiver of Canterbury, himself of African descent, the son of Monica and Patricius of Carthage, had left the Anglo-Saxon from semi-barbarism to his position of world renown. Would this Anglo-Saxon ever degrade the sons of women of Africa?