The crisis : $b A record of the darker races, Vol. I, No. 3, January 1911 — John Shaqi
The crisis : $b A record of the darker races, Vol. I, No. 3, January 1911Various
History
The crisis : $b A record of the darker races, Vol. I, No. 3, January 1911
Various
African Americans -- Periodicals
“Eventually the courts must draw the line. The dark races when
intimately associated with the white in overpowering numbers gradually
bleach out. At the fourth remove the descendants are often blond in
type. As the court seems to take no account of the actual color of the
individual in applying the classification ‘colored,’ it must be assumed
that definition must depend upon simple mathematics.”
The Taunton Gazette adds:
“By the same reasoning a man with one-sixteenth Chinese blood is a
Chinaman and one-sixteenth of the blood of any race relegates him to
that race. As a matter of fact, that question of one-sixteenth is not
likely to arise in any case save where it is desired to make out a
person a Negro, and that is where the nub of the whole matter rests.
“It is probable that there are thousands of persons in this country with
one-sixteenth Negro blood in them who do not know it themselves nor does
any one else, for family records are not always carefully kept along
these lines.”
VOTING.
The Boston Transcript has this letter from Dr. Horace Bumstead:
“Dr. Doremus Scudder of Hawaii told the American Missionary Association
in Tremont Temple that the American Negro of the future will thank his
Southern white brother for depriving him of the ballot until he should
have proved his fitness for it—and that he would thank him
notwithstanding the manner in which his ballot had been taken away. Let
us see just what this means.
“It means that the Negro will hereafter be grateful for a
disfranchisement practically based on color rather than unfitness—which
its promoters have boldly avowed was intended to disfranchise every
Negro if possible and not one white man if it could be avoided, and
which they accomplished through ‘grandfather’ and ‘understanding’
clauses artfully devised to deprive the Negro of his constitutional
guarantees for a square deal as regards suffrage qualifications.
“It means that the Negro will hereafter be grateful for a
disfranchisement which is seriously restricting his economic freedom and
opportunity, the protection of his life and property, his right to
travel in equal comfort for an equal fare, the education of his
children, and the guarding of the virtue of his wife and daughters.
“This conclusion Dr. Scudder naively states he has arrived at after
seven years’ residence, not in the South, but in Hawaii, and because the
liquor dealers there have bought up the votes of the natives. In other
words, when white men have so little control over their baser element
that they cannot keep them from offering bribes, the proper course, in
Dr. Scudder’s opinion, seems to be to take the ballot from all colored
men because some of them have accepted bribes, rather than to
disfranchise the few white men who have offered them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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