The hindered hand

by Sutton E. Griggs

The Negroes, whose absence from the mob you would ascribe to sympathy with the criminal, were in their homes sorrowing over the death of the little one, sorrowing over the disgrace that was so undeservingly brought upon the race, and wondering whether your mob had the right man or was making a mistake that would leave the really guilty free to again bring death and grief and wrath to the white race and grief and shame unspeakable to the Negro race.

AS TO INTERMARRIAGE.

Not content with picturing the Negro race, as a race prolific with the assaulters of women, Mr. Dixon would further have the world believe that the highest ambition of the cultured Negro man is to find for himself a white wife.

Perhaps it may not be out of place just here for the writer to disclose what he considers, from close observation, to be the attitude of the Negroes on the question of the intermarriage of the races. They do not hold with that group of writers who contend that the Negro is inherently inferior to the whites and that a mixture of the blood of the races produces an essentially inferior being. Dumas, holding his own among the French; Browning and S. Coleridge-Taylor among the English, and Douglass, among the Americans, to their minds belie that assertion. Nor yet do they hold that the races must needs depend upon this infusion for its greatness. The unmixed Toussaint L'Ouverture, Paul Laurence Dunbar and J. C. Price speak up for the innate powers of the race.

Accepting the race as it came to them from slavery, during which mulattoism was forced upon it, the Negroes have gone on developing race pride and visiting their supreme disfavor upon all who signify inability to find thorough contentment within the race. The marriage of Frederick Douglass to a white woman created a great gulf between himself and his people, and it is said that so great was the alienation that Mr. Douglass was never afterwards the orator that he had been. The delicate network of wires over which the inner soul conveys itself to the hearts of its hearers was totally disarranged by that marriage.

PRIDE OF RACE.

It was this feeling of race pride which the Negroes have and thoroughly understand, that Mr. Dixon was picturing in that Northern statesman who would not give his daughter in marriage to a Negro suitor who was his political ally. This pride of race Mr. Dixon confounds with the prejudice which he would glorify. How utterly absurd it is to infer that it is inconsistent in a father to apply a totally different test to a man aspiring to be his son-in-law to that applied to a man asking for political rights! The rejection of a man because he lacks generations of approved blood behind him is classed by Mr. Dixon as race discrimination, whereas such rejections are daily made for similar reasons within all civilized races.

BACKWARD AFRICA.

In his eager grasping after anything that would seem to serve his purpose of thoroughly discrediting the Negro, Mr. Dixon holds up the backwardness of Africa as an indication of the inherent inefficiency of the Negro race. The life of the great body of the Negro race has been cast for untold centuries in Africa. This one simple fact has meant and still means so much. The peculiar character of the African coast, lacking as it is in great indentations, the immense falls preventing entrance into its greatest river, the Congo—these things have caused Africans to be more nearly isolated from the rest of humanity than has been the case with any other large body of people. With isolation and lack of contact the Negroes have been compelled to rely upon their own narrow set of ideas, while the progress of other peoples has been the result of the union of what they begot with what strangers brought them.

The soil of Africa fed the Negroes so bountifully that they did not acquire the habit of industry, and with a plenty of time on their hands they warred incessantly. The hot, humid atmosphere made them black and sapped their energies. To save them from yellow fever, nature gave them pigment and lost them friends. Other peoples have hesitated to intermarry with them because of their rather unfavorable showing in personal appearance.