"The negro in Africa was, and is yet, in largest measure 'Without law except in its very crudest form'—'no law at all as we conceive it'—'in densest savage ignorance'—'no writing, no literature, no arts, no sciences'—'some development of perceptive and imitative faculties and of memory, but little of the higher faculties of abstract reasoning'—'in temperament intensely emotional, fitful, passionate, cruel'—'without self-control in emotional crises, callously indifferent to suffering in others, easily aroused to ferocity by sight of blood or under great fear'—'particularly deficient in strength of will, stability of purpose and staying power'—'dominated by impulse, void of foresight, unable to realize the future or restrain present desire'—'indolent, lazy, improvident, neglectful, happy-go-lucky, innately averse to labour or to care'—'given to uncleanness'—'an eater of snakes and snails, cannibal, eating his own dead'—'vilely superstitious, a maker of human sacrifices, charm-wearing, fetich-worshipping'—'of a religion grossly anthropomorphic, explaining all natural phenomena by a reference to evil spirits'—'his religion has no connection with morality, nothing to do with man's relation to man'—'thieving his beloved pastime, deception more common than theft'—'national character strongly marked by duplicity'—'lying habitually and thinking lying an enviable accomplishment'—'a more thorough and unhesitating liar than one of these negroes is not to be found anywhere'—'cruelly obliges his women to work'—'sensual, polygamous, unchaste'—'buying and selling his women'—'valuing his daughter's virginity solely as a marketable commodity'—'accounting adultery simply as a trespass upon a husband's property rights, and seduction and rape as a violence only to parent's property in daughters as destroying their marketable value'—'wifehood is but an enslavement to the husband's will'—'no conception of chastity as a virtue'—'of strong sexual passions'—'a devoted worshipper at the shrine of his phallic gods'—'sexual instincts dominate even the most public festivals, and public dances exhibit all degrees of sex suggestion.'
"Those in short, Mr. President, are some of the horrible details of the bestial degradation of the west-coast Africans, from whom our slave-marts were recruited almost to the time of the Civil War, and who, says Keane, are 'the very worst sweepings of the Sudanese plateau,' and, Ellis says, are 'the dregs and offscourings of Africa.'
"Such was the negro in Africa. What he is in America, only my people know. He has been the gainer at all points, the loser at none, because of his enforced residence here and his bondage to Southern white men: and yet that awful picture of the negro in Africa is so startlingly familiar to one who has spent his life in the South that he examines it closely with something of fear.
"He finds the colouring too vividly heavy and some details untrue for a picture of the negro in America to-day: but the negro as the Southern white man knows him is too alarmingly alike, too closely akin to, that African progenitor. He has advanced—yes! but just how much, and just how little, from out the shadow of that awful category of horrors, my people know.
"They know that he has but just emerged from those depths that those bestial racial traits held in check by the man's law have only well begun to be refined by a change of environment and the slow processes of heredity: and yet we, white men of the South, are in a way advised to treat as our social equals certain immediate heirs to such a blood inheritance because, forsooth, they have risen.
"We resent bitterly the insulting suggestion, however high or respectable or official its source: and we call upon you, white men of the North, to warn you against appeals for social recognition as a balm for 'the misery of the awful isolation of black men who have risen above their race.' When the blood of your daughter or your son is mixed with that of one of this race, however risen, redolent of newly applied polish or bewrapped with a fresh culture, how shall sickly sentimentalities solace your shame if in the blood of your mulatto grandchild the vigorous red jungle corpuscles of some savage ancestor shall overmatch your more gentle endowment, and under your name and in a face and form perhaps where a world may see your very image in darker hue there shall be disported primitive appetites, propensities, passions fit only to endow an Ashanti warrior or grace the orgies of an African bacchanalia? In Heaven's name think to the bottom of this question!—and think now! Await not the day 'when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you.' Do not be distracted by considerations that are superficial and incidental—such for example as the negro's record for criminal assaults upon women. The crime of rape will be abated by some means, but long after that must the negro develop before he loses his primal jungle habit of regarding woman as a personal possession. It is a matter of attitude and not of assault: and as in his fundamental attitude toward women, so in every racial characteristic the superiority of the white man is blood deep, generations old, ingrained, inherent, essential.
"Knowing this, my people despise President Phillips' social amenities to negroes of high degree. They do not fear the issue; but what insults and outrages them is that a personage in the highest official position, by an act in itself impulsive, empty, and futile, should put desires and hopes of miscegenation into the minds and hearts of the inflammable, muttering, passionate black masses of the South. Standing themselves ever in the shadow of dire calamity which they are facing and must face for long years to come as they painfully work out a righteous and practical solution of their problem, my people cry out to you, oh, white men of the North, of the insidious danger in these sentimental social practices of an exuberant Executive; and we tell you that, however well or ill you may guard the purity and integrity of your race, we will stand fast. Whatever else may or may not be true, we will never acknowledge any equality on the negro's side that does not overtake the white race in its advancing civilization, and we will certainly not submit to an equality produced by degrading the white race to or toward the negro's level. We will not make with the negro a common treasure of our Anglo-Saxon blood by putting it in hotch-pot with his in a mongrel breed.
"The Anglo-Saxon has blazed the way of civilization for a world to follow in: but if he, the torch-bearer, the pioneer, goes back to join hands with the tribes who are following afar his torch and trail, then the progression of civilization and of character must not only stop but must actually recede for him to effect a juncture with the black and backward race in the blood of a hybrid progeny. There the fine edge would be taken off every laudable characteristic of the white man. There the splendid Anglo-Saxon spirit of leadership and initiative would be neutralized by the sluggish blood of the Ethiop race. There the Anglo-Saxon's fine energies and clear sensibilities would be deadened and muddled by the infusion of this soporific into his veins. There vile, unknown, ancestral impulses, the untamed passions of a barbarous blood, would be planted in the Anglo-Saxon's very heart.
"You may believe that in the dim beginning God by imperial decree set the dividing line between these races; or, less orthodox and more coldly scientific, you may know that Nature, impartial mother of men, giving her white and black sons equal endowment and an even start in body, mind and spirit, since has stood, in unerring wisdom still impartial, to watch the white bound away from the black in his rush toward that perfection of mind, of heart, of character, which she has set as goal for the striving of her children. From whichever view-point you look upon the age-long history of men and the age-long lead of white men over their black brothers,—whether evolutionist or traditionist, scientist or mystic, you offer violence to your own particular deity, be it God or Nature, when in their present measureless inequality of development you by amalgamation would beat back the white into the lagging footsteps and gross animalism of the black.
"Menacing thus the effectiveness and integrity of a race which is the pathfinder for the progress of a world of men, the danger is not only a race danger, but a danger to universal civilization; and the preventative is a social separation of the white and black races in America from the lowest to the highest,—at least, yes in all reason, at the dictate of the plainest common sense, at least, if so be, till the black becomes approximately equal to the white in racial excellence. After which let the ethnologists take the question and give us the answer of science as to the advisability of mixing racial bloods.