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FOREWORD

The facts of race-mixing especially as they occur in the United States are incredible to many. Some years ago the editor of one of America’s best informed and most sophisticated magazines asked me to write an article on miscegenation. I did but he sent it back saying that it “sounded like gossip.”

Perhaps it did, but I could not have called names. Most Americans, in fact most light-colored citizens of the New World, are very sensitive where miscegenation with the Negro is concerned. With the Indian some will even boast; others will admit even Chinese and Japanese, but the Negro, oh Lord, they see themselves, ruined, disgraced.

This has gone so far that even some of Negro strain who could not pass for anything else, will, as soon as you mention ancestry start bragging about their “Indian” blood—a fact, which, we shall see is chronic in Latin America. Thus it was why I did not call names in the above-mentioned article though I could have done so.

This you may set down as true: After four centuries of miscegenation in what is now the United States all or nearly all situations, or combinations of situations, in race-mixing that the mind can imagine, has happened. Whatever sounds incredulous may be set down to lack of information, and shall we say, even a deliberate unwillingness to face the facts.

For instance, if the editor in question, who is one of the most broad-minded of men where the Negro is concerned had consulted a work like Helen T. Catteral’s “Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro,” he would have found facts more astonishing than those I had sent him, all the more so because they happened at a time when the Negro was much farther down socially than now.

In short, I think it will be seen from this volume as well as the preceding one, that it is possible for anyone, no matter who, to have had among the tens of thousands of his ancestors at least one Negro. We shall see, also, that many white Americans have a Negro strain and don’t know it.

To avoid the charge of gossip in this work, I have therefore quoted liberally from writers, past and present, the vast majority of whom are white. I have tried, especially in dealing with the past, to let the reader see through their eyes, not mine. This done I have then offered my own observations which are based on thirty-three years of travel and research. If I fail to call certain names and have withheld certain photographs it is because those persons are living and I think it would hurt them.

Because I have drawn from so wide a field I am, therefore, indebted to a great number of writers as well as to individuals who have given me valuable leads. I would like to be able to thank them all individually but since this is not possible I do so here collectively.

There are certain works, however, that I feel I ought to mention because of their direct bearing on the subject. First and foremost is Catteral’s work, already cited, which is a five-volume one published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D. C., and is the result of twelve years’ painstaking research through the court records of many states. No other work I know of gives so real and so vast a cross-section of the relations of white and black during slavery not only in miscegenation but in general.

Another work of great value is an unpublished doctor’s thesis by James Hugo Johnston, Jr., “Race Relations in the South, 1619-1860” (1927). Dr. Johnston’s scholarly work is also drawn from the court records. I am indebted to Dr. L. D. Reddick, Curator of the Schomburg Collection, New York City, for having told me of this work and secured its use for me from the University of Chicago.

Especially valuable, too, I found such works as A. W. Calhoun’s “Social History of the American Family”; Charles S. Mangum’s “The Legal Status of the Negro”; John Dollard’s “Caste and Class in a Southern Town”; and several volumes of the Journal of Negro History.

Special mention must be made, too, of the Afro-American of Baltimore, which has been featuring court cases and historical articles on miscegenation for the past twenty-five years. The editor, Carl Murphy, not only kindly permitted me to go through his files but personally aided me, calling my attention to articles of outstanding interest.

Among the most interesting finds of the Afro-American is that Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, great American naval hero, was of Negro ancestry. Perry’s statement that he was an “octoroon” is written in his own hand in a copy of Shakespeare owned by him, and a reproduction of which appears in this book. And, as Mr. Murphy points out, since Oliver Perry was colored, his brother, Mathew, also a great naval hero, was very likely colored, too.

Finally, and above all, I do not claim infallibility for this work. Errors must have crept in despite all my care. The best I can do is to give my sources, which I have done abundantly. I had only one aim in mind, namely to throw a saner light on the subject and this I think I have accomplished.

As for theories on race-mixing, I have tried to avoid them. I do not know whether race-mixing makes for a better or a worse “race.” What I do know is that it exists and since it exists I believe that as in all other human affairs it should be conducted on a high and dignified plane. Also I am most certain that the economic environment and the good or the bad treatment of any minority, are vastly more important than race.

To speak, as is so often done, of two “races” in the United States is to indulge in very loose talk, as loose as if one were to see a number of horses of different colors, some of which are white, and then speak of them as two “races” of horses, the white ones being one “race,” and all the others the other “race.” Similarity of education and national habits, acquired sometimes over centuries, are what make a people, not the color of the skin. If that were so the brunette white, the rufous white, and the blond white, would logically be of different races. What we have in the United States to speak and think accurately, is an American people of a vast variety of shades which blend imperceptibly from black to white, or white to black—a people with a certain national psychology, which makes its members, when seen abroad, easily distinguishable as American.

In Europe or elsewhere I had little or no difficulty “spotting” an American, no matter what his color was. The same was true of the natives who had come in contact with Americans. I recall particularly one case. It was that of a jet-black Negro, who had come to France, intending to make it his home. For forty years he had been a chef and steward on a private car, and retiring on a pension had decided to live in a land where he would at last be a free man.

But although he met with no color restrictions in France, he finally left that country in disgust and went to Spain. For aught I know he returned to America.

The reason? He was so typically American in his ways even to his large owl-like spectacles, that the Parisians, accustomed though they are to seeing Sengalese and other black people, could not help but stare at a black man who was so very much like a white American in his ways. Having associated all his life with white American businessmen and others of the upper class, he had become a a black edition of them.

Finally, there is only one race—the human race. Most men will live like brothers when some particular exploiting interest does not teach them to hate one another. White and black, as I have shown in this book never really had a chance to be friends from the start. The Virginia slaveholders taught them to hate one another—a hate that was crystallized into law, all for the benefit of the masters, who waxed fat for a while but finally lost all. Crime, we are told, does not pay. Well, neither does it pay when made into law by a powerful exploiting group.

The doctrine of racial superiority as it now exists in Germany and the United States is the insanity of the many for the gain of a few.

Now is the time while this most distressing war is on to wipe off the books those laws that make one group of American citizens the enemies of another group. Jim-crow laws have brought only evil in the past; they can bring only evil for the future. Let us start with a clean slate and give future generations a chance.