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Why This Book Was Written

This book comes in answer to the revival of anti-Negro literature that followed the ruling of the United States Supreme Court against segregation in the public school system in 1954. Research by the American Jewish Committee revealed that this literature reached a new high in 1958 (New York Times, January 21, 1959). In addition there have been the bombing of homes, churches, integrated schools, restrictive legislation in several states, and vengeance against private individuals. There has been since 1955, 532 cases of racial violence. New Orleans increased the number with its riots in December, 1960, Athens, Georgia, with riots in January, 1961, and Alabama riots in May, 1961.

The Bible, particularly, has been used to promote this hate literature. An example was a widely-issued pamphlet, “The Racial Issue,” by the Florida Baptist Institute declaring that “God Is A God of Segregation,” with abundant Bible quotations. Full-page ads paid for by racists appeared in Northern dailies, the chief of which was that of the first week of January 1959 in over 30 Northern dailies as the New York Times (January 5), the Wall Street Journal, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in an open letter to the President. The writer, Carleton Putnam, is “a distinguished New Englander … member of the famous New England Putnam family,” graduate of Princeton and Columbia, author of a “widely-praised” biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and the founder and president of the Chicago and Southern Air-Lines. The ad “was paid for by individual donations from hundreds of citizens throughout the South.”

Mr. Putnam’s chief support for the inferior position he would assign to the Negro is based on what Lord Bryce, British statesman and once ambassador to the United States, said on Negro “barbarism” in “The Present and Future of the Negro” in his “The American Commonwealth” published in 1880. Bryce’s work was considered a classic, the finest then produced on the American government. He was also considered a great friend of the United States.

Mr. Putnam quotes Bryce:

“History is a record of the progress towards civilization of races originally barbarous. But that progress has in all cases been slow and gradual. … Utterly dissimilar is the case of the African Negro, caught up in and whirled along with the swift movement of the American democracy. In it we have a singular juxtaposition of the most primitive and the most recent, the most rudimentary and the most highly developed types of culture. … A body of savages is violently carried across the ocean and set to work as slaves on the plantations of masters who are three or four thousand years in advance in mental capacity and moral force. Suddenly, even more suddenly than they were torn from Africa, they find themselves, not only free, but made full citizens and active members of the most popular government the world has seen, treated as fit to bear an equal part in ruling not only themselves, but also their recent masters.”

When Bryce wrote that the Negro had already been in the United States 368 years—since 1512 with the Spaniards and 1619 with the English. The great majority of these Africans had come before 1808, or 72 years before Bryce wrote. Thus very, very little had been left psychologically of the original African. Uprooted from their native land and ways and scattered among the white population there was nothing left for the Negroes but to adopt the language, customs, religion and general teaching of the whites. They adopted these so much that it is a matter of record that the descendants of Africans born among the whites generally looked down on the newly-arrived African. In short, though black without, they were white within. In addition, a vast amount of white strain had entered into the American-born Negro and very much, too, of Negro strain into the whites. Bryce, then it is clear, ignored all of this and wrote from the prevailing misconception that the whites represented the summit of civilization and that the Africans and their descendants here the depth of primitive savagery. Bryce in mentioning the “moral force” of the whites, ignored the fact that a vast number of early white Americans were convicts and other most objectionable persons, while the only black convicts that came were those living among whites in Europe. Africa, at least the part from which the slaves came, had no jails, bolts, locks, bars, or any need for them. Again, the Irish immigrants, generally, were much more degraded than the Africans.

Bryce, in short, wrote with little or no research on his subject, that is, ignorantly. Putnam gives him hearty approval, however. He says, “One does not telescope three or four thousand years into the 78 years since Bryce wrote.” The inference is that the Negro is still what Bryce erroneously believed him to be.

To justify his position on Bryce’s theory, Mr. Putnam quotes from Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 as follows:

“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor qualifying them to hold office … I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Now Mr. Putnam gushes with love and sympathy for the Negro. ‘Personally I feel only affection for the Negro,” he says. But it happens that this Lincoln quotation has been a favorite with the great Negro-haters for the past eighty years — from Tillman of the Reconstruction to Bilbo of our time. All such felt that was sure-fire argument. Was it not Lincoln, great “friend” and “liberator” of the Negroes saying that? Putnam, who loves them so, runs true to their form. “The Negro,” he says, “owe more to Lincoln than to any other man.”

Mr. Putnam’s ad is effective because of the general ignorance not only of white friends but of most of the Negroes on the true history of what has happened since the arrival of the Africans here 446 years ago. The facts have been presented here. It is left to the reader to judge.