Slavery -- United States; United States -- Politics and government -- 1861-1865; United States -- Race relations
Surely the good people of the north ought to learn the difference between
the negro race and the white. There is a small class of exceptional
negroes which is assumed by a great many at the north to be most fair
samples of the average negro of the south. Dr. Washington and Professor
DuBois severally lead the opposing sections of this class. It consists of
authors, editors, preachers, speakers, some who with small capital in
banking, farming, and other business, have each by Booker Washington's
blazon been exalted into a national celebrity, and others. Its
never-sleeping resolve, fondly cherished by the greater part, is to "break
into" white society and some day fuse with it. Its members are nearly all
at least half white, and many are more than half white. But when a Bourbon
snub to one of them is received, as it often is, with dignity and proper
behavior, Mr. Louis F. Post, and a few more, exclaim to the country, "See
how this coal-black and pure negro excels his would-be superiors!" This
man, almost white, is to them a coal-black, genuine, unmixed negro. Ought
not attention to facts incontrovertibly cardinal to rule here as
everywhere else? To what is due the great accomplishment of Dumas,
Douglass, and Booker Washington--to their negro blood or to their white
blood? If half negro blood can do so well, why is it that pure negro blood
does not do far better?
I have seen it asserted that Professor Kelly Miller is pure negro. His
head has the shape of a white man's. The greyhound crossed once with the
bull-dog, as Youatt tells, and each succeeding generation of offspring
recrossed with pure greyhound until not a suggestion of bull-dog was
visible, occurs to me. Thus there was bred a greyhound, possessing the
desired trait of the bull-dog. Who can say that there is not among the
professor's American ancestors one of half white blood? If there is in
fact no such, he is, in his high attainment, almost a _lusus naturae_.
The north, by due attention, will discern that the small number
constituting what I provisionally name the upper class of negroes, is
hardly involved in the race question.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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