Wichita daily eagle. [volume] (Wichita, Kan.) 1884-1886, 1886-04-27
THE SOUTHERN NEGRO.
WIDELY-DlvERGENT VIEWS HELD BY
THREE CLASSES OF WHITES.
The Colored Man rs . Very Initiative
Animal 80 Has an Original Genius"-
HAS Native Capacity Equal to That
of the White"

@Niggers amt got no sense naturally-an
they know they sort O. pick up from
white folks Then it sort O. stews up in
their heads an they git it out in their way,
and you all call it big niger sense"
This c:acular statement by a native with
whom | rode on the Richmond q Danville
road srEas up the real opinion of the mass OF
uneducated southerners. They are person
ally liberal, friendly to all men, and kind to
the colored people; but they are skepticsl
about the results of general education And
il is a striking proof Of the native liberality
OF the southrons that they are practically
unanimous in favor of popular education,
despite their wide divergence of views as to
tie result Each maintains that the
result will justify his own opinion, but
all want to sec the experiment fully and
fairy tried After talking with 100 men in
Virginia and many in North Carolina, l
sum up that the south has three opinions, as
follows:
WHAT ONE CLASS MAINTAINS.
One class maintains that all the progress
80 far made by the colored southron and
they admit it is great is simply the result
of conscious or unconscious imitation The
negro, they say, is very initiative animal;
lie is surrounded By a progressive white
population, and the attrition of free soci
ETY. forces him along. and in support of
their theory they point to these suggestive
facts: That all or nearly all the noticeable
progress of the colored people is in the white
states and counties, where the negro can not
rule or take the initiative, but follows the
lead of the white majority; while in the
black counties one must take sight to see
that he moves at all. They point to the de-
graded condition Of the coiored men in the
black towns and the black suburbs o. white
towns and most of all TO the sea islands of
South Corolina and few other districts
where the negro is monarch of all he sur
veys
There, they ask me to observe, he is sta
tionary or retrograding; his religion is run
ming down to q sort of transp!anted fetch
ism, his industry is fitful and unorganizei,
and his morality consists in not getting
caught They also assert with vehement
emphasis, that every smart Niger in the
United States is miscesene-generally half
white or more-and running over the long
list Of talented colored men from Douglass,
Langston and Turner to Pinchback and
Williams, the defy me to point TO one tai
ented man in the nation who was not some
Caucasian blood in him. The reported pro-
RltsS IN Cciii al ablC%i, tucS ody,
proves nothing, or rather it confirms their
view, for that is an Arab and Mohammedan
civilization, imposed upon the negroes by
conquest: and, what is more, those are not
negroes of the caste from which our slaves
come In short they maintain that all this
boosted progress, absolutely all of it, is the
result of imitation and miscegenation.
4 much smaller class maintains that the
negro has an original genius and a capacity
for civilization which is developing in AT
RIGA without attrition, and much faster in
this country with it. They concede his
pres mt inferiority to the white, but think
a good deal of it due to slavery. They have
much to say of a general law Of develop
ment by Nirasse of which every race OF man
has been once ON top or is to be, just as
every dog has his day; and as the negro has
not had his day, it is to come While he
now is, and may long remain, inferior to the
white, yet we can not say what
gre the sources of civilization We
can not explain. why people long stagnant
suddenly begin to progress, yet such has
been the case with other races, and will lie
with the negro.
CLIMATE AND CIVILIZATION.
They incline to the view that climate is
slowly rhsngins the race; that even the
full blond is not as black or as prognsthous
as be was a century ago, and that in time
civilization will bleach him to a degree not
now conceived of, with corresponding
modification of the facial angle When
they grow confidential, men of this class
hint at miscesenation and the final ABSORB
ton of the colored people into the great fG-
ture American But as a rule they keep
such fancies to themselves, except in talk
with intimates
There is, however, strange as it may seem
a small class of native southrons who MAIN
tain that the American negro now has n ma
tive capacity equal TO that Of the average
white; THAI it has been repressed by slavery
ami subse, Iueat forces but when the press
ure is removed it rebounds with an elasticity
that ca ries the negro forward faster than
the white They deny emphatic ally that
the white ma jority operates as an impuisive
force or the blacks; on the contrary, they
say 1t is repreSsive that it makes the negro
feel inferior, lowers his self esteem, and so
retarGs him. They deny that the negro Is
retrograding on the sea islands and in the
bottoms inhabited entirely by that race,
and claim that he is progressing there much
faster than do the mean whites of the
sand hill country. They sheer at the oft
quoted examples of Hayti and Guiana, main
tanning that the So called negroes there are
nothing but mongrels-sprung from
.played-out race of French and Spanish
indoles on the one side, and the worst posi-
BILE black tribes on the other-without room
or liberty TO develop IT, they say, the orig
inal whites OF those countries had been
American Saxons, you would long ere this
have seen the mixed race taking high rank
in the world -Parke's' Letter IN Chicago
Times
smaii-Pox I'm Japan's Sluma
An apidemir Of small pox is "a ciny In tha