In other words, don’t crossings help in breeding?_
It depends on what is crossed. Crossing two superior breeds may or
may not produce an improvement. Such crossing must be carefully
controlled--much more carefully than is possible with human
beings--before we can speak with assurance. But one thing is sure:
crossing a superior with an inferior breed can only pull the superior
down.
+American Democracy+
_Was not American democracy founded on the idea of the equality of all
men?_
As I have pointed out, Jefferson’s phrase, “all men are created equal”,
which he used in the Declaration of Independence, is a corruption of
the original wording as it appeared in the Virginia Declaration of
Rights and as it was afterwards copied in many state constitutions. The
original wording read: “All men are born equally free,” and this was
the true foundation of the American ideal. Lincoln, in his Gettysburg
Address, simply copied Jefferson’s corruption.
It should be noted that Jefferson, in writing the Declaration of
Independence, followed the phrase “all men are created equal” with the
phrase “they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights ... among [which] are life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.” Liberty, in other words, was given the same standing in
the Declaration as equality--and a moment’s thought will show that the
only sense in which equality can co-exist with liberty is in the sense
of equality of opportunity. In any other sense, if men are free they
won’t be equal, and where men are equal they are not free. Hamilton put
this point clearly when he said in the Constitutional Convention of
1787: “Inequality will exist as long as liberty exists. It unavoidably
results from that very liberty itself.”[10]
I would not deny Jefferson’s antipathy to slavery, nor the fact that in
an early draft of the Declaration he had a reprobation of slavery which
he omitted in the final draft because of the opposition of certain
signers, nor Lincoln’s view that the Declaration was conceived by many
as setting up a “standard maxim ... constantly labored for, and even
though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated and thereby
constantly ... augmenting the happiness and value of life to all
peoples of all colors everywhere.” But as to the majority of signers
there can be no doubt of the accuracy of the statement contained in a
speech by Stephen A. Douglas in the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858:
“Now, I say to you, my fellow-citizens, that in my opinion the signers
of the Declaration had no reference to the Negro whatever, when they
declared all men to be created equal. They desired to express by that
phrase white men, men of European birth and European descent, and had
no reference either to the Negro, the savage Indians, the Fiji or the
Malay.... One great evidence that such was their understanding, is
to be found in the fact that at that time every one of the thirteen
colonies was a slaveholding colony, every signer of the Declaration
represented a slaveholding constituency, and we know that no one
of them emancipated his slaves, much less offered citizenship to
them, when they signed the Declaration; and yet, if they intended to
declare that the Negro was the equal of the white man, and entitled
by divine right to any equality with him, they were bound, as honest
men, that day and hour to have put their Negroes on an equality with
themselves....
“My friends, I am in favor of preserving this government as our fathers
made it. It does not follow by any means that because the Negro is not
your equal or mine, that hence he must necessarily be a slave. On the
contrary, it does follow that we ought to extend to the Negro every
right, every privilege, every immunity which he is capable of enjoying,
consistent with the good of our society.”
I call your attention particularly to the last paragraph quoted above,
and most especially to the last seven words. On it and them Lincoln and
Douglas would certainly have agreed.
It might be noted in passing that the Declaration of Independence is
not the charter of our government. The Constitution is the charter, and
its preamble states its purpose to be, among other things, to “secure
the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”. No mention
is made of equality. Of the constitutions and bills of rights of the
48 states as of 1917 (the last available printing) only two use the
equality clause of the Declaration of Independence and one of these,
North Carolina, had it forced upon her by federal bayonets during
Reconstruction. In fact, if one examines the constitutions of all the
countries of the world, one finds only four which contain the concept
of cultural, economic or social equality. Those four are Guatemala, the
Mongol Peoples Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Modern equalitarians have not been above practicing certain deceptions
in regard to Jefferson’s attitude toward the Negro. On a marble
panel in the Jefferson Memorial in Washington is a fragment of one
of Jefferson’s sentences. As inscribed on the panel the words are:
“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these
people [the Negroes] are to be free.” As written by Jefferson, there
was no period after these words. There was a semi-colon, and the
sentence continued: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally
free, cannot live under the same government.”
Myrdal uses somewhat the same technique in his _Dilemma_ when he quotes
the first part of Jefferson’s sentence at page 85, and postpones any
reference to the thought in the second half until five pages later,
when he quotes another and weaker sentence from a different volume of
Jefferson’s writings.
Almost all the great statesmen of our nation’s past have foreseen the
danger of the Negro among us and have sought to remove it, even to the
point of transplanting the race to Africa. The idea of making the Negro
the social equal of the white man never entered their heads. Among
those beside Jefferson and Lincoln who favored removal to Africa may
be mentioned Francis Scott Key, John Randolph, Andrew Jackson, Daniel
Webster, and Henry Clay. The modern segregationist is in good company.
Nor should one be beguiled by the equalitarian’s claim that this cloud
of witnesses is obsolete. The truths involved here are not the sort
that become obsolete short of many hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
* * * * *
_Does not equality of opportunity for the Negro require desegregation?_
If equal facilities, teachers, and curricula are provided, (and where
this is not being done, it should be done, and the Supreme Court should
have made _this_ the issue) there can be no inequality of opportunity.
I have already answered, in my letter to the Attorney General, the
charge that segregation produces a sense of inferiority, and that a
sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. What
the Negro is really demanding is social equality with a group that
does not desire his company. He is in effect saying that unless he has
social equality he cannot study as well. A white girl might just as
well say that she cannot study unless she is presented at Court.
* * * * *
_How can the Negro earn status if he is not given the opportunity to
earn it?_
This repeats the previous question in a somewhat different form.
Segregation, properly administered, as I have said, does not interfere
with any Negro getting an equal education if he has the ability
and desire. Concerning social status, when, as, and if the average
Negro, whether in his segregated school or elsewhere, has on his own
initiative evolved into the sort of person with whom the average white
man wants to associate, this will soon become apparent to both parties,
and segregation will then cease. Social equality cannot be made a
condition to the earning of social equality.
It should be kept in mind that every man, black or white, must carry
with him to some degree the burden of his background, both as to race
and as to family. Let us consider this first from the standpoint
of family. To achieve absolute equality at the beginning of every
life would require the sacrifice of something even more important,
namely, the family, and the responsibility of parents toward their
children. One inducement to the good life on the part of a parent is
the tradition he passes on. His thrift and self-denial secure his
children’s education, his character sets an example--to deny a man this
influence, for better or for worse, would not only sap the marrow of
our civilization, but deny what a majority of Western Europeans would
consider a fundamental human right.
The corollary, however, is unavoidable. Not all children have an equal
home life in the formative years. The sins and virtues of the father
are visited upon his offspring. Both heredity and early environment are
unequal. Every white man faces this. Few of us are so fortunate as not
to be surpassed in both heredity and environment by someone else, which
gives meaning to the old saying: “Life’s not in holding a good hand,
but in playing a poor one well.”
In similar fashion, in the case of race, the sins and virtues of our
racial forbears are visited upon their descendants. It might be thought
easier, in this instance, to assure each generation a fresh start, but
consideration will show that the heritage of race is in part implicit
in the family environment and in part in heredity. Both the black
and the white child receive a legacy which is a mixture of family and
racial heredity and environment. Society can no more make them equal as
to the racial component than it can make them equal as to the family
component. The problem, according to our Western concept of life, is
private because any other theory entails sacrifices greater than the
gains.
* * * * *
_Isn’t it wrong to injure the self-esteem of any man by reflections on
his racial background?_
No man’s self-esteem need be injured by the truth concerning his racial
background, any more than an acceptance of innate limitations by people
in any sphere need affect their pride. Most of us do not hang our heads
in shame if we cannot invent like Edison or write like Shakespeare. As
I said in the answer to the preceding question, it is what we do with
what we have that counts. We must rouse ourselves to recognize that the
equalitarian has no compunction about using the instinct of pity in us
to destroy us. It is a classic instance of virtue being kidnapped to
serve vice.
* * * * *
_Isn’t it unfair to discriminate legally against the exceptional Negro
on the basis of a racial average?_
We discriminate legally against exceptional minors by not allowing them
to vote, although certain of them may be more intelligent than many
adults. Discriminations of this sort are necessary to the practical
administration of human affairs.
* * * * *
_Is not the indulgence of personal preference in regard to the company
one keeps a right only in private situations? Can one white child avoid
another white child whom he considers inferior by insisting he be put
in another school?_
The question confuses the case of an individual, acting for himself,
with the case of the people of a state as a whole, acting by majority
rule, or by whatever rule the fundamental law of the state provides.
The people thus acting can do anything they please, within certain
constitutional limitations. If the majority in a state decide that
smokers should be segregated from non-smokers in public conveyances
because non-smokers prefer not to associate with smokers in such
places, I do not suppose this would be held unconstitutional, although
failing such a law, an individual, acting alone, would not have the
right to protest. An analogous situation is found in the segregation in
separate hospitals of the victims of contagious diseases.
The test is one of reasonableness. The smoker is not harmed, nor the
victim of the contagious disease, by segregation with those in a like
situation, and if the remainder are benefited, the public welfare is
promoted by the procedure. None of this could be accomplished by a
private individual attempting to exercise a personal right to freedom
of association.
* * * * *
_How can school be considered a “social” situation?_
Particularly in rural areas, schools are a social center, but it is
true enough elsewhere. There is usually a cafeteria where students
lunch together; athletic contests are often held at night and students,
following the team, travel in school busses and fraternize before,
during and after the game. There are dances. The comments of an 18 year
old white girl in an integrated Northern high school published in _U.
S. News and World Report_, may properly be quoted here:
“I remember reading somewhere that a famous sociologist said that about
the last person that the average white kid would be interested in is a
Negro. I have news for him. Integration is a gradual process. At first
it is difficult to see anything but that they are Negroes. Later you
think of them as just people and then as friends. As one girl I know
put it, from there it is just a hop, skip and a jump before you think
of them as more than friends. Almost every white girl I knew had a
secret crush on one of the colored boys. The crushes varied from warm
friendship to wild infatuation.... One of the girls felt guilty about
it but she kept on dating the colored boy.... She once told me that if
people were going to object they shouldn’t expose us to the temptation.
As she put it, we’re not all saints.”
Some integrationists have suggested segregation of the sexes as a
solution to this problem but not only would this force the South to
give up co-education for white children, it would be at least a poor
palliative of the underlying difficulty. As I have said elsewhere,
little brother would still bring his new Negro friend home after
school. One cannot break down the social barriers among either sex
without eventually breaking them down heterosexually.
The technique of gradualism is a notorious one in the progress of
equalitarianism, socialism and communism. Seize a little today and
it will be easier to seize a little more tomorrow. In fact, all evil,
fascist or communist, advances in this manner. One can mention Munich,
as well as Moscow. The reason, I think, is that once a principle falls,
the inner demoralization has set in, and soon everything else goes. As
one respected Southern editor has expressed it in speaking of token
integration: “If integration is wrong, as we believe it is, we do not
concede that a little bit of it is right.” Or, as another well known
Southern author has written: “To suppose that we can promote all other
degrees of race mixing but stop short of inter-racial mating is like
going over Niagara Falls in a barrel in the expectation of stopping
three-fourths of the way down.”
One other point overlooked by those who dismiss as unimportant the
risks of intermarriage in the South is the erosive effect upon
personal standards of the equalitarian ideology. This may be expected
slowly to overcome many barriers that have hitherto existed. A youth
brought up to believe all races potentially equal is first conditioned
to disregard the evidence of his senses and the dictates of sound
judgment, and then to feel the added pressure of pity. Here, he thinks,
is a member of a race which has suffered “cultural deprivation”--not
only will time adjust all differences, but marriage may be a recompense
for injustice. This dual impact, when added to the factors already
mentioned, is well understood by the equalitarian and is counted upon
by him to achieve his purpose.
* * * * *
_Are not the children themselves perfectly willing to integrate?_
A child left to itself is perfectly willing to experiment with
anything, including explosives. That is the reason courts appoint
guardians for children who have lost their parents.
It must always be remembered that the first thing a group or party
that wishes to remake a civilization to suit itself is going to do is
to corrupt the relatively defenseless minds of children. The extent
to which this process has already succeeded in the North with the
generation that has now become adult is alarming enough. Integration is
the next step.
* * * * *
_If the races, left to themselves, tend to intermarry, doesn’t this
mean that it is the natural thing to do?_
Consider a garden that has been carefully cultivated for many years.
What happens if it is left to nature?
+Christian Ethics+
_Does not the Christian religion promise salvation to all men, and are
not all men consequently equal in the sight of God?_
Yes, as to the first part of this question; no, as to the second.
Many people have written me confusing salvation with status. I agree
that the Christian religion offers salvation to all true believers,
but this has nothing to do with status. Status has to be earned, in
religion as elsewhere, by merit. I need only point to Christ’s parable
of the talents, and of the foolish Virgins, or to the Letter of James,
Chapter 2: “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith
alone, for as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart
from works is dead.” I may also remind you of the words of Peter,
“Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue
with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control and self-control with
steadfastness and steadfastness with Godliness.”
To assume that a person who wastes his life, albeit confident in
his redemption through faith, stands on an equal footing before God
with a man who strives to progress in character and service, is to
make a mockery of the Christian religion. Similarly, to suppose that
a good, but weak and stupid man--albeit weak and stupid through
environment and heredity rather than through any initial fault of his
own--stands other than potentially on the same rank with the good,
and strong and intelligent, man within the hierarchy of heaven would
be to suppose that God puts no premium on the development of strength
and intelligence as either an earthly or heavenly goal. Nothing does
greater injustice to the character of Christ Himself. Christ was
a Man of infinite compassion, but He was not a Man of maudlin or
undiscriminating sentimentality. Christ’s life, among other things,
might well be called a study in firm discrimination.
* * * * *
_But would Christ have discriminated according to race? Was it not
always with him a matter of individual worth?_
Of course. I have never maintained anything to the contrary. In all
matters involving dealings between individuals, where the question of
intermarrying is not involved, I think individual worth alone should
be the criterion. But there is nothing un-Christian in facing the
fact that, as individuals differ in merit, so averages differ among
races in those attributes involving specific cultures. Judgments as
to the average have to be made accordingly. I must repeat that there
are few perfect systems in this world, we have to deal with practical
realities, and when we are confronted with a situation where a race
must be considered as a race, there is no alternative to building
the system around the average. The minor handicap to the exceptional
individual, if such there be, is negligible compared to the damage that
would otherwise result to society as a whole.
The Christian religion is based upon the concept of growth. We grow
as individuals and as races, and not always in the same direction.
Individuals or races wishing to move into a society alien to their
native culture must have the patience to grow in adaptability and in
capacity to contribute to the new culture, and the growth in the case
of races takes many generations.
Esme Wynne-Tyson, looking at the subject from the standpoint of
England, recently put the matter well in _The Contemporary Review_, one
of Britain’s leading monthly magazines:
“Almost every man is in a different stage of development, and,
even more obviously, are nations and races in different phases of
evolution.... It is not a problem that can be solved by any sentimental
humanism, or religious insistence that all men are the children of
God....
“The natives of the West Indies have a legal right to enter England as
British subjects, but it is not their biological or spiritual home,
and may well prevent their natural evolution which can only take place
gradually in the environment and culture native to them. On the other
hand, the instinctive feeling of many inarticulate but intuitive
British people that a mingling of races, which is, more basically, a
mingling of two incompatible evolutionary streams, is not ‘right,’ is
a sure one. Specifically they complain of the coloured races being
dirty, noisy, or immoral; but these objections are only the outward
and visible signs of a different stage of spiritual development, a
lower culture, and it is this which is sensed and resented by numbers
of British people who have no personal ill-will towards their coloured
neighbours as such....
“What amounts to an enforced intermingling of white with coloured races
in this country at the present time is being resented at a deeper level
than most people imagine. The rising generation of British youth is
already badly handicapped in its evolutionary struggle by the moral
degradation which was involved in, and has resulted from, the last war
combined with the wholly unspiritual atmosphere of thought engendered
by scientific materialism. And their parents, observing this, cannot
submit passively to witnessing their further deterioration through
mixing with people of a still lower ethic and culture. The young people
of Britain are not themselves sufficiently ethical to instruct their
companions how to rise. Evolution is an arduous task. It is far easier
to sink than to rise.
“We have an object lesson of this in modern America which has badly
suffered from close propinquity with its less evolved immigrants. The
‘hot’ music, primitive dances, and other sensual practices of the
coloured races, have permeated with their devolutionary influences,
every corner of a once-Puritan civilization, debasing and obstructing
the process of an originally highly ethical people. Hence the
instinctive fear lying at the back of much of the present colour
prejudice in this country [England].”
It may be too late to return the American Negro to his biological
and spiritual home, but it may not be too late to redeem in America
the heritage of the white race. Unless this is done, it will not be
long before many a white man in the United States will have cause to
paraphrase De la Mare’s lines:
“This is not the place for me;
Never doubt it, I have come
By some dark catastrophe
Far, far from home.”
* * * * *
_What’s the use in trying to convince my mind when my heart tells me
segregation is wrong?_
In the twenty-second chapter of St. Matthew’s gospel, you will
find these lines: “Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him
a question, tempting him and saying, Master, which is the great
commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy
mind. This is the first and great commandment.”
There seems little doubt that most of our difficulties are due to a
failure to use our minds as well as our hearts, and that more of the
evil in the world is created by fools than by knaves. Well intentioned,
but ignorant or stupid, people are at the bottom of most of the
world’s troubles. The heart, unguided by wisdom, soon leads us into
emotionalism and thence into chaos. I have often recalled Dickens’
reference to the “first mistaken wanderings of an undisciplined
heart” in watching some of the tragedies of youth, and I have seen
much the same process in adults. Unless the heart and the mind work
together, there is no hope for success in the pursuit of happiness by
the individual or society. In a prayer I once heard, the pastor used
a phrase which I recommend to you, “Lord, help our hearts to think
straight.”
* * * * *