CHAPTER VIII
THE MULATTO: THE PROBLEM OF RACE MIXTURE
I had not been long engaged in the study of the race problem when I found myself face to face with a curious and seemingly absurd question:
“What is a Negro?”
I saw plenty of men and women who were unquestionably Negroes, Negroes in every physical characteristic, black of countenance with thick lips and kinky hair, but I also met men and women as white as I am, whose assertion that they were really Negroes I accepted in defiance of the evidence of my own senses. I have seen blue-eyed Negroes and golden-haired Negroes; one Negro girl I met had an abundance of soft straight red hair. I have seen Negroes I could not easily distinguish from the Jewish or French types; I once talked with a man I took at first to be a Chinaman but who told me he was a Negro. And I have met several people, passing everywhere for white, who, I knew, had Negro blood.
Nothing, indeed, is more difficult to define than this curious physical colour line in the individual human being. Legislatures have repeatedly attempted to define where black leaves off and white begins, especially in connection with laws prohibiting marriage between the races. Some of the statutes define a Negro as a “person with one-eighth or more of Negro blood.” Southern people, who take pride in their ability to distinguish the drop of dark blood in the white face, are themselves frequently deceived. Several times I have heard police judges in the South ask concerning a man brought before them:
“Is this man coloured or white?”
Just recently a case has arisen at Norfolk, Va., in which a Mrs. Rosa Stone sued the Norfolk & Western Railroad Company for being compelled by the white conductor, who thought her a Negro, to ride in a “Jim Crow” car. Having been forced into the Negro compartment, it remained for a real coloured woman, who knew her personally, to draw the line against her. This coloured woman is reported as saying:
“Lor, Miss Rosa, this ain’t no place for you; you b’long in the cars back yonder.”
It appears that Mrs. Stone was tanned.