The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn

by William Benjamin Smith

(10) Complexion deep brown or blackish, and in some cases even distinctly black, due not to any special pigment, as is often supposed, but merely to the greater abundance of the coloring matter in the Malphigian mucous membrane between the inner or true skin and the epidermis or scarf skin.

(11) Short, black hair, eccentrically elliptical or almost flat in section, and distinctly woolly, not merely frizzly, as Prichard supposed on insufficient evidence.

(12) Thick epidermis, cool, soft, and velvety to the touch, mostly hairless, and emitting a peculiar rancid odor, compared by Pruner Bey to that of the buck goat. [ [11] ]

(13) Frame of medium height, thrown somewhat out of the perpendicular by the shape of the pelvis, the spine, the backward projection of the head, and the whole anatomical structure.

(14) The cranial sutures, which close much earlier in the Negro than in the other races. To this premature ossification of the skull, preventing all further development of the brain, many pathologists have attributed the inherent mental inferiority of the blacks, an inferiority which is even more marked than their physical differences. Nearly all observers admit that the Negro child is on the whole quite as intelligent as those of other human varieties, but that on arriving at puberty all further progress seems to be arrested. No one has more carefully studied this point than Filippo Manetta, who, during a long residence on the plantations of the Southern States of America noted that 'the Negro children were sharp, intelligent, and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change set in. The intellect seemed to become clouded, animation giving place to a sort of lethargy, briskness yielding to indolence. We necessarily suppose that the development of the Negro and White proceeds on different lines. While with the latter the volume of the brain grows with the expansion of the brain-pan, in the former the growth of the brain is on the contrary arrested by the premature closing of the cranial sutures and lateral pressure of the frontal bone.'" (La Razza Negra nel suo stato selvaggio e nella sua duplice condizione di emancipata e di schiava, Torino, 1864, p. 20).

This last point is one of such supreme importance that it seems well to strengthen it by additional testimony. Says the renowned Cesare Lombroso, in his "L'Uomo Bianco e L'Uomo di Colore" (1892), p. 28: "The development of the African baby is altogether different from ours. In its first days it does not show the dark color of the adult; the sutures of the head, which with us close up only late in life, with it ossify speedily, as in idiots and monkeys, and the anterior sooner than the posterior. Also its face becomes projecting and prognathous only after the first dentition; and only after the thirteenth year its head is seen to grow longer and its skin to grow darker. The same may be said of the mental (morale) development; for the Negro, precisely like the monkey, shows himself very intelligent up to puberty; but at that epoch, when our intellect spreads its wings for more daring flights, he stops and turns backward..." This profoundly significant arrest of development in the Negro is equally observable in school and out of it. Among many witnesses, hear one of the most unexceptionable, J. M. McGovern, in a symposium in the Arena (Vol. 21, p. 439): "My experience has shown me that, while at the start a negro child often shows ability quite equal to that of a white child at the same age, yet if the two children, one white and one coloured, each of average intelligence, are kept in the same class, in a short period the white child far outstrips the negro—at least in all those studies where diligent application and depth of thought are necessary for success." This testimony seems particularly valuable, since it is based solely on "experience" and is plainly independent of any doctrine concerning cranial sutures.

In the work already cited, Lombroso mentions several other minute yet important particulars in which the Negro anatomy diverges from the Caucasian toward the simian, but sufficient have been adduced. It may be replied that each and every one of these divergences may be found here and there among Caucasians. This is true, but the reply is no answer. All sorts of reversions to lower type are to be met with in higher species, but this by no means negatives the fact that some species are more and some are less developed. The well-formed type still exists in spite of the occasional malformations. Besides, it is not the presence of any single indication on which our argument is grounded, but the simultaneous presence of a great number of indications. It is these in their entirety that distinguish the Negro so notably, and remove him toward the anthropoids; and over against this fact the occasional aberrations among the Whites have no argumentative weight whatever.

That the Afro-Americans are by no means racially identical, though racially related, is a fact well known, but worth recalling. Some are racially very distinctly superior to others, even as were their ancestors in the African fatherland. On this point we submit the highly intelligent and unprejudiced testimony of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, the well-known professor of geology in Harvard University. In the Popular Science Monthly (Vol. 57), he attempts a classification of the Southern Blacks. First come those of the "Guinea type"—the purest Negro—who are "distinctly of a low type," and who number one-half of all. Those of the Zulu type are much higher, and number perhaps five per cent. of all. The Arab Negro, found in Virginia, is of a finer and more delicate mould, and numbers (say) one per cent. The Red Negroes, the Bongos and Mittus mentioned by Schweinfurth as "red-brown," like their native soil (Heart of Africa, Vol. I., p. 261), are Albinoidal, and number perhaps one per cent. The rest are of mixed types. The Guinea "folk are of essentially limited intelligence;" the Zulus are fit for anything that ordinary men of our own race can do; the Arabs are more educable, but of a sombre disposition; the red are inferior. The Mulattoes are of feeble vitality, rarely surviving beyond middle age. Professor Shaler's father, an able physician, had never seen a half-breed more than sixty years old. As the reputation of the Mulatto is generally bad, perhaps unjustly, "we may welcome the fact that this mixed stock is likely to disappear" (pp. 33-38). In a later article in the same volume, Professor Shaler contributes some valuable thoughts and estimates. Thus: "The simple yet valuable lessons of the soil-tiller they have had. For the greater number of their race, particularly those of the Guinea type, this grade of employment is as high as they may be expected to attain" (p. 148). "I feel safe in saying, from the basis of personal experience with the negroes, that somewhere near one-third of them are fit to be trained for mechanical employment of a fairly high grade" (p. 149). We do not see how it is possible to call in question either the competence or the fair-mindedness of this distinguished observer. It is worthy of special attention that he attests both the hopeless inferiority of the (pure Negro) Guinea type and at the same time its decisive numerical preponderance. The real question before us, then, concerns not so much the Negro in general, of whom there are notably superior varieties, as the very lowest Negro that West Africa has yet produced.

Here, then, we let the anatomical argument rest for the present. A minuter treatment will be found in a more appropriate connection in a following chapter.

It is a favourite subterfuge of the champions of the Black man to ascribe his unamiable characteristics of mind and temper, if not of body, to the centuries of enslavement, debasement, and even persecution that he has passed on this continent. Now we have no apology whatever to offer for the "institution" of African slavery. We recoiled from it instinctively at the dawn of consciousness, and we regard it now as an unmitigated curse to the people that practise it. But we must not leave unexposed the gross error in the defence just mentioned. These centuries have indeed been centuries of enslavement, but certainly not of debasement nor any form of retrogression. For slavery is and has been, from time immemorial, practically universal in the fatherland of the Negro—slavery more cruel and degrading and inhuman than is known elsewhere on the globe. We enter into no details, unwilling to make our pages needlessly repulsive. In fact, the training of servitude in the South has worked mightily for the Negro's advancement—not unlike the domestication of the lower animals. Any who will read the descriptions of travellers, or the pages of Lombroso—L'Uomo Bianco e L'Uomo di Colore—must admit that the humanizing of the African in the South has proceeded surprisingly far. However elementary and contradictory may be his notion and his practice of morality now, on his native heath he has practically no morality at all. "It is more correct to say of the Negro that he is non-moral than immoral. All the social institutions are at the same low level, and throughout the historic period seem to have made no perceptible advance, except under the stimulus of foreign (in recent times notably of Mohammedan) influences.... Slavery continues everywhere to prevail ... cannibalism is practiced ... human flesh appears to be sold in the open marketplace" (Keane). All this talk, then, of the Negro's degradation, wrought by his American slavery, is the absolute inversion of the truth.