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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 4. Racial Beliefs - 5. The Position of the Negro Writers
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Chapter 4. Racial Beliefs 95
augmented emphasis to ward off similar charges against the despised and rejected
Negro.^®
To the Southerners particularly he gave the following rejoinder:
The white people of the South claim, or rather boast of, a race prepotency and
inheritance as great as that of any breed of men in the world. But they clearly fail
to show like attainment.^*^
and added maliciously:
Has it ever occurred to you that the people of New England blood, who have
done and are doing most to make the white race great and glorious in this land, arc
the most reticent about extravagant claims to everlasting superiority? You protest too
much. Your loud pretensions, backed up by such exclamatory outburst of passion,
make upon the reflecting mind the impression that you entertain a sneaking suspicion
of their validity.^®
This is heated polemics but not without its point. On the central issue his
best formulated argument is probably contained in the following sentences:
The Negro has never, during the whole course of history, been surrounded by
those influences which tend to strengthen and develop the mind. To expect the
Negroes of Georgia to produce a great general like Napoleon when they are not
even allowed to carry arms, or to deride them for not producing scholars like those
of the Renaissance when a few years ago they were forbidden the use of letters,
verges closely upon the outer rim of absurdity. Do you look for great Negro states-
men in States where black men are not allowed to vote?^®
Gjneerning the physical disabilities of the Negro, he was full of scorn:
Do you recall the school of pro-slavery scientists who demonstrated beyond doubt
that the Negro’s skull was too thick to comprehend the substance of Aryan knowl-
edge? Have you not read in the now discredited scientific books of that period with
what triumphant acclaim it was shown that the shape and size of the Negro’s skull,
facial angle, and cephalic configuration rendered him forever impervious to the
white man’s civilization? But all enlightened minds are now as ashamed of that
doctrine as they are of the one-time dogma that the Negro had no soul.®®
If at the time when he was writing, he could have seen the modern devel-
opment of intelligence research, on which we shall comment in a later
chapter, he would have had still more arrows for his bow.
Miller has been quoted at some length here because his attitude is typical
of the thinking of the intellectual Negroes on this issue for several dec-
ades,®^ in fact, from the first time the Negro people had a group of
individuals trained to independent scholarly thinlang. These early Negro
intellectuals were in all certainty just as much driven by their rationalization
interests as their white colleagues. Only their interest went in the opposite
direction. In the development of intelligence research it is apparent that
Negroes and members of other minority groups always had a tendency to
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