The Journal of Race Development. January 1915.
Vol. 5, No. 3. pp. 297-315.
Accessed via JSTOR: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29738048

The Psychology of American Race Prejudice

By George W. Ellis

Civilization is confronted with many sociological problems, among the greatest of which, perhaps, is the worldwide existence of interracial prejudice between 606,000,000 white and 1,099,000,000 colored people, inhabiting the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the islands of the sea.

Its menacing era began with the physical conquest of the Americas in the New World, with the social and baneful institution of slavery, founded upon race and color. Its causes were chiefly economic on the one hand, with the political weakness of the Negro Africans on the other.

Modified Form of Slavery

Physical slavery was abolished and this era was followed by another more modified form of slavery, in which the white nations took control by force and violence of the colored races and reduced them to political subjection in Asia, Africa and a number of islands. The causes were still at bottom economic, supported by superior military power against political disunity and disintegration; yet, tempered by the development of humane sentiments, the growth of democracy and the progress of civilization.

Awakening of Colored Races

The birth and expansion of the Senussi movement in the African black belt, the dissemination of the propaganda of "Africa for Africans" in South Africa, the efforts for independence in India and Egypt, and the rapid assimilation of western methods and culture by Japan and her sudden entrance into the first rank of the white nations, announce the gradual awakening of the colored races and the ultimate arrest and overthrow of the world sway and extension of white political supremacy over the colored peoples.

Prejudice of World's Colored Belt

The world's colored belt is more and more being marked by frequent expressions of increasing acute race antagonism. In Mexico it is the whites against the Indian; in Australia the whites against the Asiatics and blacks; in South Africa the whites against the Asiatics and blacks; in the West Indies in a very modified form the whites against the blacks; and in the United States the whites against the Asiatics and blacks. One may well pause, therefore, and inquire what is the psychology, the mental significance of all this anti-interracial feeling and hostility?

America As Center of Prejudice

One of the most striking and interesting illustrations of the universal problem of race prejudice exists in the United States, where the supposed two most widely dissimilar and divergent types of the human race are brought together in large numbers and close contact, in the atmosphere of theoretical freedom and democratic equality. A general diagnosis of this situation, therefore, will afford the key to the understanding of the larger question, of which this is but one of the worst and yet most hopeful phases.

The American race situation is the most important because it is the most complex and dynamic. It possesses every element of the other phases and more. Here it challenges the further progress of Christianity and civilization in the foremost democracy of the earth. Here it presents the acid test to the culture of the most modern and progressive branch of the white race. And those who are responsible for the bringing of colored people to the United States in such large numbers as to present so grave a sociological problem, transmitted to this and other generations the high moral responsibility of finding a solution that is not only just to both races, but in harmony with democracy and liberty enlightening the world.

Accepted Meaning of Terms

In what we are now considering, we accept psychology as the science of the phenomena and functions of the mind and soul. Race is used as a mere convenience to designate the different branches of the human family. And prejudice is a prejudgment without facts, a decision or opinion of the mind formed without examination and knowledge; and therefore without any reasonable basis and justification for its existence.

The psychology of race prejudice then involves the erroneous mental attitudes which one race entertains for or against another, formed in advance and without foundation in either reason or fact.

Factors of American Race Prejudice

If we want to understand the race question in the United States, an examination must be made into the historical antecedents of the false opinions the whites have and hold against other race groups and vice versa.

In the United States race prejudice is predicated upon the belief that the colored race is naturally inferior to the white race, physically, intellectually, religiously, socially and morally. As a matter of ultimate fact it is actually based upon the advantages, temporary and imaginary, which the white groups believe they derive from this superior attitude to the colored groups economically, politically and socially. A historical study of these beliefs discloses that two powerful factors have contributed above others to the abnormal American situation, and that in their broadest sense they are ethnological and sociological.

Quality of Natural Prejudice

There is a natural antipathy or prejudice which one entertains toward new things and strange persons about which one knows little or nothing. Anything is liked or disliked as it harmonizes with one's present opinion or is strong enough to win approval and establish its supremacy. When brought into contact with new phenomena, in the human mind there is at once precipitated a struggle of established ideas and thought-forms to preserve themselves against the ascendency of new thoughts and ideas.

one knows little or nothing. Anything is liked or disliked as it harmonizes with one's present opinion or is strong enough to win approval and establish its supremacy. When brought into contact with new phenomena, in the human mind there is at once precipitated a struggle of established ideas and thought-forms to preserve themselves against the ascendency of new thoughts and ideas.There is the same natural antipathy between dissimilar groups and races to maintain their institutions against the substitution of others, as in individuals; and this antipathy continues until the stronger group assimilates the weaker. The degree of natural antipathy, individual or group, toward another is in proportion to the extent of believed or actual dissimilarity. Whether in the individual, group or race, this antipathy disappears with contact, knowledge and understanding. It assumes the more permanent form of prejudice with its dangers and penalties, when the stronger group consciously and wilfully refuses to assimilate and cultivates and encourages this natural antipathy until it forms a part of the mores and exercises the function of a social norm. Then all the political and social power of the stronger group is invoked to maintain an attitude of artificial difference and superiority, and the natural process of assimilation is checked and postponed. Until this artificial attitude is unquestionably and permanently established or overthrowing its maintenance is constantly attended with friction and confusion, destroying and undermining the best of the participating groups. India illustrates the national decay and death which attend the permanent triumph of prejudice founded upon class. But in the United States race prejudice is more to be dreaded and feared than the caste of India; for while one may change his class he can never change his race. So that as long as there is hope for democracy in the United States there will be a vital and serious challenge to the final supremacy of race prejudice.

Preference Supported by False Science

Toward making permanent the prejudice between the white and colored races, ethnologists have played an important part, by placing upon ill-founded and erroneous conclusions concerning the white and colored races the stamp and authority of science.

portant part, by placing upon ill-founded and erroneous conclusions concerning the white and colored races the stamp and authority of science.Ethnological writers like Gobineau of France and Ammon of Germany taught and established the false theories that the races were naturally unequal; and that their intellectual and moral capacities were indicated by craniological differences, shape and size of limbs, color of the skin, texture of the hair, the weight and size of brain, &c. In Gobineau's work, entitled Essai sur l'Inegalite des Races Humaines, 1854, he claimed that art, science, and civilization sprang solely and exclusively from the Aryan race in seven civilizations: Indian, Egyptian, Assyrian, Greek, Chinese, Italic and Germanic. Galton, in his Inquiries into Human Faculty, and M. Vacher de Laponge, in L'Anthropologie et la Science Politique, successors to Gobineau, accordingly contend, that Greece and Rome fell because the dolichocephalic elements in the European population were succeeded and invaded by the brachycephalic types; and that the Germans and English, and all Europe, are threatened by the infusion of the inferior blood of the brachycephalic nations like France, Poland, Turkey, and Italy, and that dolichocephalic and Aryan elements predominate in Belgium, Holland, Scandinavia, Germany, and England, and thus making them naturally superior to all other national groups. These claims are interesting in view of the present European situation, and especially the intellectual claim, and conflicting views put forth by the leading scholars and scientists in Germany, France and England.

Adoption of False Ethnological Standard

The Gobineau and Ammon school adopted the best form of the white race as the standard of measurement and judged all other race varieties as they approximated or diverged from it. As the Negro presented apparently the widest physical divergence, they assigned to this race the lowest intellectual and moral estate in the genus homo. Because of differences in the Negro's color, hair and the weight of the brain; because of differences of the angle of the cephalic index and the general anatomical structure of his organism, as compared to that of the white standard, scientists not only condemned the Negro to the lowest human plane, but they exaggerated these differences, gave to them meanings and interpretations which are not and never were true. In the zest of their cause they overlooked the additional facts that the standard they adopted is not representative of the white races, whose differences among themselves are quite as substantial as from the Negro.

Adoption of the False Negro Type

As representative of the Negro they selected the ugliest type, and after exaggerating its deformities, they held it up to the white mind of the reading world, in striking contrast to the white standard, to give permanence and stability to the false doctrine of natural Negro inferiority. In geographies, encyclopedias, ethnological writings and anthropological works, in high schools, colleges and universities, this false Negro type was circulated with this perfect white standard to impress the rising generations of all nations against the black, and to solidify with the sanctity of science that natural antipathy which always attends the initial contact of unassimilated individuals or groups, whether they be human, and of the same race or of different races or of the lower animal forms.

Features of Abnormal Negro Type

The picture of the Negro as set forth by the ethnological type is the next thing in order to the ape family. Types corresponding to it, however, are to be found in all races. European and American writers in the fields of science and literature, not only asserted Negro inferiority, but denied to this race any capacity for improvement. In word and picture they taught the world that the true Negro was less than human, with

an oval skull, flat forehead, snout-like jaws, swollen lips, broad, flat nose, short, crimped hair, calfless legs, highly elongated heels, and flat feet.

If an attempt were made to describe one of the higher man-apes it would be difficult to find a more exact and fitting description.

Interpretation of Evolution

Concomitant with this anti-Negro ethnological propaganda, Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, Spencer, Haeckal, and others, announced the doctrine of evolution and supported it with such force by evidences from all the allied and other sciences, that the leaders of modern philosophy, religion and science, accepted this principle and ultimately embraced it as the most tenable explanation of that grand process in accord with which the universe and all therein came into being and advanced to its present state. In the light of this view, more than other races, the proximity of the Negro to the anthropoid apes—the gorilla, gibbon, chimpanzee, and the orang-outang—was believed to have additional scientific proof and demonstration.

Methods of Prejudice Manufacture

Writers in history and other departments of literature, designedly excluded the Negro, contrary to fact, from honorable mention and participation in historical progress, and after a time went so far as to assert that the Negro had made no contributions to civilization. For several generations, from the fortified ramparts of school, college, university, literature, and science, the white mind was so assiduously assailed and so constantly besieged, that the white race was thoroughly inoculated and filled with the virus and poison of race prejudice. It is through these potent agencies and powerful channels that the ethnological science has been such an influential factor in creating, diffusing and crystallizing race prejudice in the social mind of the whites, by the use of false data and ill-founded opinions against the Negro, in the educational and social system.

The great newspapers of the country have cooperated in the propaganda of race prejudice by making the crime of every Negro racial, rather than individual, and employing the use of the word, "Negro" in glaring head-lines for no other purpose than to inflame the popular mind against this race, and to teach the false doctrine that the Negro is more criminal and naturally inferior to other race groups. The newspapers have played upon this prejudice until they have created a hostile sentiment against all colored races, and the popular mind has been so contorted and misguided that the announcement of the most wilful falsehood in the papers creates a riot and mob rule, which overrides reason and law, often erroneously and wrongfully destroying property and taking human life before this falsehood can be corrected. At first this sentiment was developed to be directed against the Negro alone, but it has so grown that it is now used against the different elements of the white race itself, in which the foundations of law and democracy are being completely undermined.

Disfranchisement, Jim-crow cars, illegal discrimination, mob violence, and segregation are but abnormal expressions growing out of the distorted condition of the popular mind, which have attended the development and growth of race prejudice.

Important Sociological Contentions

Dr. Albion W. Small, the noted sociologist of the Chicago University, contends that society is a series of social processes. Dr. Schaffle, of Germany, insists that it is a social body. Herbert Spencer, the distinguished philosopher, and one of the greatest of sociologists, held that society is a social organism, with highly differentiated and integrated parts with specialized functions. And if the book of Professor Ellwood, of the department of sociology of Missouri University, on Social Psychology, is correct, society has a social mind.

The Poisoning of the Social Body

With all the blighting and baneful effects which race prejudice has wrought by reason of its firm intrenchment in the white social mind, it has not rested there, but extended the domain of its dangers and disasters, by injecting its poison into the life blood of the great social body or organism, with all of its sacred institutional organs, economic, religious, social, political and moral. Long before race prejudice had poisoned the social mind of the white race, it had entered and found permanent lodgment in the white social system, through the institution of African slavery, as it existed in the two Americas.

Historically speaking, as with its beginning in the new world, slavery was economic, and it became racial when the development of humane agitation made its continued existence no longer even temporarily defensible, except upon the new and invented doctrine of natural Negro inferiority. Writers in history and anthropology began then to write more to justify Negro slavery than to advance the cause of truth and knowledge. It is through the institution of Negro slavery, and the white man's vested and imaginary interests therein, economic, social and political, and the false and unjust propaganda which he set in force and motion against the Negro to perpetuate them, that rank and importance are given to the sociological contributions to American race prejudice.

Economic Loss of Slavery

Whether it includes the members of one race group, or those of many, all slavery at least contributes to class prejudice in many ways. In the South it gave rise to economic prejudice, and divided labor and industry into two departments, free and slave, and after a time the work performed by the slave was considered beneath the dignity of a white person to do. So that both labor factors were confined within artificial limitations, and neither of them were allowed to work freely in accord with their capacities and the natural laws of industry; nor to contribute their full strength to the economic life of the South and the nation. Under this system the whites established the doctrine that because of their superiority they had a right to have the darker races work for them for nothing. The injustice of that doctrine is still everywhere to be seen in the industrial life of the nation, where colored peoples are treated industrially differently from other American citizens, and are not permitted to advance and work in positions according to their capabilities and character. Certain lines of work and certain positions are not open to colored persons no matter how high in character or brilliant in qualifications. In numerous instances colored people are denied the opportunity to work and contribute their highest and best toward the economic life and strength of the country, and the terrible injustice of this economic situation is a survival of the still greater injustice of American slavery. The economic life of the nation, therefore, will not be free until this racial barrier is removed, and all citizens are permitted to contribute their best toward the economic welfare of the country.

Intellectual Prejudice

Aside from an economic prejudice, society through slavery made the white mind feel that it was created naturally superior to the Negro mind, and all the social institutions and machinery were so arranged as to give to the Negro mind the same impression. The whites were educated in all the arts, sciences and literature; the Negro was kept by law and custom in abject ignorance of all the treasures of learning, except that they were intended alone for the service and adornment of white mentality. Much of the white man's time and talents were diverted from constructive efforts for social progress, to repressive and obstructive measures in keeping the Negro mind ignorant, and self-conscious of its own supposed natural inferiority. Neither the whites nor the blacks were permitted to think and develop mentally according to their full capacity; and because of this intellectual prejudice no one can tell what the country and the world has lost through the want of the intellectual cooperation of the white and colored people in the South.

The intellectual attitude between the two races today is the result of the extreme position taken by the South to perpetuate slavery. The slavery doctrine that the Negro could not learn the white man's culture and which at the same time made it a crime to teach him to read and write, has been modernized to the effect that education spoils the Negro. In the South the Southern whites believe in giving the Negro, therefore, as little education as possible, while in the North they give him as much education as he can absorb, but they deny to him any opportunity to earn a living with his education. The great fact is, that the whites have not recovered from the false theory of natural inequality of races on the one side, and the colored peoples have not fully awakened to the truth of their own natural racial equality, on the other. The intellect of the nation will assume its normal condition when these old false ideas have been completely eradicated from the public mind, and all classes and races are given their true intellectual status, in accord with their merits rather than their race. The intellectual strength of the nation will be greatly augmented by the positive and constructive use of its great natural talents, unfettered by racial and class limitations.

Religious Prejudice

The Christian religion is the highest expression of religious development. Conceived in love and established by practice, it is founded upon the broad principles of the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood of man, of every race and country. From Nazareth the lowly spirit of the Christ, for nineteen centuries, has invaded in triumph every continent and delivered its message of love and salvation to every race, that each might know and feel its duty to its fellow man, and secure peace on earth and redemption in the great beyond. In carrying forward this noble work the white race has been the great missionary to other races. But because of economic and intellectual race prejudice, the white race has shown, with all the aid and assistance of its great religion, an amazing inability or disinclination to practice toward the Negro what it so vehemently preaches to the world. And few things show more truly how injurious race prejudice really is, than the said historical fact that it corrupted the practice of the white race in so sacred a matter as its religion, and that in the white race of Europe and America, it dimmed the glory and lustre of the Cross.

Political Prejudice

The government of the United States represented at its birth the political dream of centuries. By its constitution it substituted for the capricious control of man the government of the people regulated by law. Founded upon the freedom and equality of all men, it invited to its shores the oppressed of every land. Its founders laid the foundations of a democracy that was supposed to be a political light to the nations of the earth. But before this government was established the institution of slavery had manufactured so much class prejudice in industry, education and religion, that at the adoption of the constitution, the white race was unable to make this government in fact what in theory it was announced to the world. American society generated and condoned so much prejudice before the abolition of slavery, that the country since has not been able politically to remove the evil effects of its former bad example. One white man South has always had greater political power than two or three white men North, to say nothing of the practical exclusion of the Negro people from their proportionate representation and participation in the government of which they have long been a contributing and important factor. That the government has been unable in the hands of the white man to do political justice to itself and to the Negro, is in great measure due to the influence of the sociological factor in race prejudice. American injustice to her colored citizens deprives the American people of their just influence in the world movement of freedom and democracy. The practice of the people must be more in harmony with the theory of the government before this nation will be on a safe and sound political basis.

Influence of Prejudice on Morals

To my mind the supreme destiny of man is moral. This is alike true of a nation. Whether we consider morals as intuitive or utilitarian, to be right is the crowning glory of social conduct and achievement. During two and a half centuries, the white race went to Africa, and took the Negro race from its home and country, and compelled it by superior political force to work for the white race for nothing. This was and is a great moral wrong. For it justice demanded in part atonement the awful pains and penalty of a terrible civil war, with all its prodigious waste of life and treasure.

The class prejudice, which mentally attends any kind of slavery, impaired American and European morals toward the Negro in all the important institutions of society, and seriously threatened the overthrow of the monogamic marriage in the Southern part of the United States. The unbalancing of the morals of the white race was so widespread that European nations still insist upon controlling colored races for the benefit of the whites; and the American people have abandoned the Negro to those who insist on excluding him from the equal opportunities, benefits and protection of democratic institutions, and of governing the blacks in the interest and welfare of the whites alone.

The terrible and devastating war, now raging in Europe, with all its world-wide consequences and effects, is a splendid illustration of the unexpected, yet unerring rewards which follow the acceptance and adoption of false and erroneous doctrines. The practice by European powers of controlling colored races in the interest of themselves and against the governed has impaired and weakened European morals and led to the European struggle among the great nations in an effort to exploit and annex the weaker peoples. It is a strange irony of fate that these great white nations of Europe in their extremity have been compelled to call upon the darker races to save white civilization against itself.

Carefully studied and thoroughly understood the conflict in Europe has important lessons for the American people in their interracial attitudes and relationships.

American Social Situation

It is therefore due to the educational influence of science, literature, and Negro slavery, acting upon the social body and mind of the white race against the Negro, supported by an active and increasingly hostile sentiment and emotion, that constitute the historical cause of that abnormal social situation in the United States, which keeps before the country a menacing social question, the nature and genesis of which the future destiny of democracy on this continent and the cooperation of the white and colored races require that we carefully study and understand.

The social situation, with its intellectual error on its psychic side and crystallized sentiment on the sociological, is a threatening social malady; it embraces years of ethnological misrepresentation on the one hand and social customary practice on the other. It is rational to believe that normal conditions will be restored when the intellectual and social poison has been removed from the social mind and body, in the historical way. This situation has more in it than race prejudice. This is disclosed by such anomalous facts as that the Southern whites do not object to Negro servants occupying the same cars and hotels as themselves but they object to educated Negro gentlemen and ladies upon an independent basis. They are opposed strongly to social equality as they interpret it, yet Southern men do not object to the most intimate social relations with colored women. These, and many other contradictory positions in the Southern situation, force the conclusion, that there is something besides race prejudice upon the alleged basis of inferiority. They announce that they are opposed to the Negro because of his lowly condition, and yet they antagonize his efforts to move into better localities, and to occupy better premises. At one time they said that the basis of their opposition was on account of the criminal and the lower classes of the Negro people but the sanction of segregation in the Federal government at Washington is conclusive proof that the opposition is directed toward the upper and most highly selected classes of the colored people.

Race Orthodoxy In The South

In a recent book published by Neale Publishing Company and written by Prof. Thomas Pearce Bailey of the University of Mississippi, under the title of Race Orthodoxy in the South, the writer leaves no further doubt, if any existed, as to the creed and principles in accord with which the South keeps by its racial conduct a menacing race problem before the country. In numerous passages through the book the author admits that the conduct of the South toward the Negro is in support of a social program, which is out of harmony with the principles of Christianity and democracy; but, that this abnormal and extraordinary Southern attitude is required by the necessities of the Southern situation, the same plea which has been made by the oppressors against the oppressed in every age.

On page 93 Professor Bailey sets forth the principles of what he calls Race Orthodoxy in the South as interpreted by a group of representative Southerners. It is interesting to note what he says are the essentials of Southern racial creed and action. They are:

1. "Blood will tell."
2. The white race must dominate.
3. The Teutonic peoples stand for race purity.
4. The Negro is inferior and will remain so.
5. "This is a white man's country."
6. No social equality.
7. No political equality.
8. In matters of civil rights and legal adjustments give the white man, as opposed to the colored man, the benefit of the doubt; and under no circumstances interfere with the prestige of the white race.
9. In educational policy let the Negro have the crumbs that fall from the white man's table.
10. Let there be such industrial education of the Negro as will best fit him to serve the white man.
11. Only Southerners understand the Negro question.
12. Let the South settle the Negro question.
13. The status of peasantry is all the Negro may hope for, if the races are to live together in peace.
14. Let the lowest white man count for more than the highest Negro.
15. The above statements indicate the leadings of Providence.

This book is remarkable in the fullness and frankness with which the author boldly presents the South's new challenge to the further progress of Christianity and democracy in the United States. No doubt the more advanced views concerning the Southern situation as given by Gardner in The Basis of Ascendency, Weatherford in Negro Life in the South and Present Forces in Negro Progress, and Merriam in The Negro and the Nation have contributed toward the necessity which now requires that the position of the South be defended by all the resources of the ripest scholarship and the most skillful argumentation. Already the contest is on not only in the South, but in the nation for justice, freedom, opportunity and equality before the law, for the white and colored races alike. What will the outcome be?

New Ethnology Being Written

In the meantime ethnologists like Boas and Chamberlain of the United States and Peschel of Germany are making a new ethnology, in which the truth is being told concerning the Negro as well as the whites. We now know that in nature there is only one race—the human race; that physical features, the cephalic angle, the texture of hair, the shape of the head, the color of the skin, the size and shape, or the size and weight of brain, have little or nothing to do with the capacity of the mind or the moral quality of the soul; that like other race varieties the Negro is a product of the complex and subtle forces of his milieu, whether in this country or elsewhere, acting upon him for centuries past; that there is no naturally superior and inferior race, and that no race has a monopoly on either beauty, intellect or culture.

As Royce of Harvard says in his Race Questions and Prejudices:

We are now interested in the minds of men. We want to know what the races of men are socially good for. And not in the study of skulls or of hair, or of skin color, and not in the survey of all these bewildering complications with which physical anthropology deals, shall we easily find answer to our more practical questions, viz., to our questions in which these various races of men are related to the interests of civilization, and regarding the spirit in which we ought to estimate and practically to deal with these racial traits of mankind.

All men, so far as we can yet study them, he continues, appear to us not, of course, the same in mind, but yet surprisingly alike in their minds, in their morals, and in their arts.

Supposed Negro Type Condemned

Winwood Reade says:

The typical Negro is a rare variety even among Negroes.

And speaking of that cruel and accepted Negro type, which still pictures the Negro so unjustly to each rising generation of both races in America and Europe, Peschel virtually announces its ultimate doom in these positive words:

No single tribe, however, possessed all these deformities. The color of the skin passes through every gradation, from ebony black, as in the Jolofs, to the light tint of the mulattoes, as in the Wakilema, and Barth even describes copper-colored Negroes in Margli. As to the skull in many tribes, as in the above Jolofs, the jaws are not prominent, the lips are not swollen. In some tribes the nose is pointed, straight, or hooked; even Grecian profiles are spoken of, travelers say with surprise that they cannot perceive anything of the so-called Negro type even among Negroes.

The Negro in Civilization

Not only is the Negro coming into his own in ethnology, but through white writers and scholars like Winwood Reade, Dr. Bradford, Professor Taylor, Sir Harry H. Johnston, Dr. J. Scott Keltie, Dr. Nasseau, Mary H. Kingsley, E. D. Morel, Count de Cardi and numerous social workers like Madam Woolley; travelers like Bruce, Baker, Felix Du-Bois, Stanley, Livingstone and Mungo Park, are lifting the veil of misrepresentation which, for so long, has covered the Negro in Africa and elsewhere, and he is coming forth in his notable place with other races in history and in civilization.

Ripley and Sergi have brought together a vast array of facts to show that in prehistoric times, a branch of the African Negro race, on the shores of the Mediterranean, gave to the world the foundations in art, science, astronomy, mathematics and religion.

Volney and Eckler contend with convincing proof, that the Negro in Ethiopian Africa originated those various religious systems to which many branches of the Semitic and Aryan races are today so numerously and reverently attached.

And as to the origin of modern civilization, of which some of the white race never tire of boasting, Hoskins, Heeren, Champollion, Rossellini and other white European investigators and travelers support the claim that the arts and learning of Egypt, and ultimately of Greece and Rome, came from the Ethiopian kingdom and Negroland of Meroe in the upper valley of the Nile.

Example of Noted Negroes

In poetry, music and literature distinguished and scholarly Negroes like Baba and Sadi of Timbuctu; Hayford, Sarbah and Blyden of West Africa; Pushkin, Dumas and Taylor of Europe; Ferris, Dunbar and Braithwaite, Chesnut, Miller and Lynch, Douglass, Williams, Scarborough, Washington and DuBois, and social service workers like Mesdames Barnett of Chicago and Terrell of Washington, are convincing examples of the demonstrated equality of colored people, and of the notable contributions which Negroes can render in behalf of the intellectual and social freedom of all the races of men.

If the Negro and the white people who love justice are determined to know the truth regarding the equality of the races, and through education and literature, assist in giving it to the world, the citadel of race prejudice in the United States will tremble until it falls.

No Negro need be ashamed of his race. In this thought I am reminded of those appropriate lines which the Negro scholar and writer, Dr. Blyden, translated from Homer, written when the Gods were pleased to dine with members of the Negro race:

The sire of Gods and all the ethereal train,
On the warm limits of the farthest main,
Now mix with mortals, nor disdain to grace,
The feasts of Ethiopia's blameless race,
Twelve days the powers indulge the genial rite,
Returning with the twelfth revolving night.