"From long and intimate acquaintance with the negro’s character, my
people know that the Phillips negro luncheon stimulates not the negro’s
ambition and endeavour to improve himself as it tickles and arouses his
vanity. When the ordinary darkey hears of it he thinks it not a
recognition of the superior abilities of Bishop Martin and Doctor Woods,
but a social recognition of the negro race; and forthwith deems himself
the equal of the white man and desires unutterable things. And not
without reason.
"The black people appreciate what the President’s act means for them.
They do not misinterpret its tendency. A prominent negro said in a
recent mass meeting in Richmond: ’No two peoples having the same
religion and speaking the same tongue, living together, have ever been
kept apart. This is well known and is one of the reasons why the
dominant race is crushing out the strength of the negro in the South. I
am afraid we are anarchistic and I give warning that if this oppression
in the South continues the negro must resort to the torch and the sword,
and that the Southland will become a land of blood and desolation.’
"This inflammatory utterance indicates the interpretation put by negroes
upon President Phillips’ open-dining-room-door policy, and the nature of
the hopes and aspirations it arouses in the black man’s heart. And the
serious thing is the element of truth in the negro’s erroneous
statement. It is true as gospel that no two races of people, living
together, have ever _intermingled socially_ without amalgamating. It is
hardly necessary to cite evidence of that fact or to give the reasons
underlying it. It might be taken as axiomatic that social intermingling
means amalgamation.
"If men and women were attracted to each other and loved and mated
because of equal endowments of virtue, or intelligence, or beauty, or
upon any basis of similar accomplishments, tastes, or mental, moral or
physical excellences, then a gulf-stream of Anglo-Saxon blood might flow
unmixed and pure through a sea of social contact with the negro race;
but until love and marriage are placed among the exact sciences, social
intermingling of races will ever result as it ever has resulted: in the
general admixture of racial bloods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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