“These figures are of little value. Indeed, as an indication of the extent to which the races have mingled, they are misleading.”
From my own observation, and from talking and corresponding with many men who have had superior opportunities for investigation, I think it safe to say that between one-fourth and one-third of the Negroes in this country at the present time have a visible admixture of white blood. At least the proportion is greater than the census figures of 1870 and 1890 would indicate. It is probable that 3,000,000 persons out of the 10,000,000 population are visibly mulattoes. It will be seen, then, how very important a matter it is, in any careful survey of the race problem, to consider the influence of the mixed blood. In the North, indeed, the race problem may almost be called a mulatto problem rather than a Negro problem, for in not a few places the mixed bloods are in excess of the darker types.
Many mulattoes have a mixed ancestry reaching back to the beginning of civilisation in North America; for the Negro slave appeared practically as soon as the white colonist. Many Negroes mixed (and are still mixing in Oklahoma) with the Indians, and one is to-day often astonished to see distinct Indian types among them. I shall never forget a woman I saw in Georgia—as perfect of line as any Greek statue—erect, lithe, strong, with sleek straight hair, the high cheekbones of the Indian, but the lips of the Negro. She was plainly an Indian type—but had no memory of anything but Negro ancestry. A strain of Arab blood from Africa runs in the veins of many Negroes, in others flows the blood of the Portuguese slave-traders or of the early Spanish adventurers or of the French who settled in New Orleans, to say nothing of every sort of American white blood. In my classification I have estimated 3,000,000 persons who are “visibly” mulattoes: the actual number who have some strain of blood—Arab, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Indian—other than Negro, must be considerably larger.
It is a curious problem, this of colour. Several times, in different parts of the country, I have been told by both white and coloured observers that Negroes, even without the admixture of white blood, were gradually growing lighter—the effect of a cold climate, clothing and other causes. A tendency toward such a change, an adaptation to new environment, is certainly in accord with the best scientific beliefs, but whether a mere century or two in America has really operated to whiten the blackness of thousands of years of jungle life, must be left for the careful scientist to decide. It is certain that the darkest American Negro is far superior to the native African Negro.
Story of a Real African Woman
At Montgomery, Ala., Mr. Craik took me to see a real African woman, one of the very few left who were captured in Africa and brought to this country as slaves. She came in the Wanderer, long after the slave trade was forbidden by law, and was secretly landed at Mobile about 1858. She is a stocky, vigorous old woman. She speaks very little English, and I could not understand even that little. She asserts, I am told, that she is the daughter of a king in Africa, and she tells yet of the hardships and alarms of the ocean voyage. Her daughter is married to a respectable-looking Negro farmer. Mr. Craik succeeded, in spite of her superstitious terrors, in getting her to submit to having a picture taken.
And yet all these strange-blooded people are classed roughly together as Negroes. I remember sitting once on the platform at a great meeting at the People’s Tabernacle in Atlanta. An audience of some 1,200 coloured people was present. A prominent white man gave a brief address in which he urged the Negroes present to accept with humility the limitations imposed upon them by their heredity, that they were Negroes and that therefore they should accept with grace the place of inferiority. Now as I looked out over that audience, which included the best class of coloured people in Atlanta, I could not help asking myself:
“What is this blood he is appealing to, anyway?”
For I saw comparatively few men and women who could really be called Negroes at all. Some were so light as to be indistinguishable from Caucasians. A bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church who sat near me on the platform was a nephew of Robert Toombs, one of the great men of the South, a leader of the Confederacy. Another man present was a grandson of a famous senator of South Carolina. Several others that I knew of were half-brothers or sisters or cousins of more or less well-known white men. And I could not hear this appeal to heredity without thinking of the not at all humble Southern blood which flowed in the veins of some of these men and women. How futile such advice really was, and how little it got into the hearts of the audience, was forcibly impressed on me afterward by the remark of a mulatto I met.
“They’ve given us their blood, whether we wanted it or not,” he said, “and now they ask us not to respond to the same ambitions and hopes that they have. They have given us fighting blood and expect us not to struggle.”