The daily herald. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1886-1887, 1886-09-02
THE SOUTHERN NEGRO.
WloELY-plvEHeENT VIEWS HELD BY
THREE CLASSES OF WHITES.

The Coiored Man us Very Initiative
Animal ''--"Has an Original Genius''--
HAS Native Capacity Il ual to That
of the white"
"Niggars amt got no sense naturally--all
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 oracular statement by native with
whom rode on the Richmond & Danvile
road sums up the real opinion Of the mass of
uneducated southerners They are person
ally liberal, friendly to all mon, and kind to
the colored people; but they are skeptica1
about the results of general education. And
il is striking proof Of the native iberality
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 win justify his own opinion, but
al want to see tile experiment fully and
fairly tried After talking with 100 men in
Nirginia and many IN North Carolina,
sum up that the south has three opinions, as
follows
WHAT ONE CLASS MAINTAINS.
One class maintains that all the progress
50 far made by the colored southron and
they admit it is great Is simply the result
OF conscious or unconscious imitation Tho
negro, they say, is very initiative animal;
he is surrounded by a progressive white
population, and the attrition Of free soc-
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 coored people is in the white
q! tfa ho aon M
ruls or take the initiative, but follows the
lead of the white majority; while in the
black counties one must take sight to sec
thaS he moves at all They point TO the de-
g aided condition of the colored men in the
black towns and the black suburbs OF white
towns, and most of all TO the sea islands of
South Coroina 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 a sort of transplanted fetch
ism, his industry is titful and unorganizei,
and his morality consists in not getting
caught They also assert with vehement
emphasis, that every smart nigger' in tho
United States is misSegene-- generally half
white or more--and running over the long
list Of talented colored men from Douglass,
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
gress in high central Africa, they say,
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 mose, those are not
negroes of the caste Fl ON which our slaves
come. In short they maintain that all this
boosted progress, absolutely all of it, is the
result of imitation and miscegenation.
A much smaller class maintains that the
negro has an original genius and capacity
for civilization which is developing in AT
RIGA without attrition, and much faster In
this country with it. They concede his
present 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 virtue of which every race of man
has been once on top or is to DO, 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
are 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 viii be
with the negro.
CLIMATE AND CIVILIZATION
They incline to the view that climate is
slowly changing the race; that even the
full blood is not as black or as prognathous
as he was century ago and that in time
civilization will bleach him to degree not
now conceived OF, with a corresponding
"reotidcation Of the facial angle y When
they grow confidential, meh of this class
hint at miscegenation and the final absorp-
ton of the coiored people into the great flu
ture American. But as a rule they keep
such fancies to themselves, except in talk
with intiInates
There is, however, strange as 1t may seem
a small class of native southrons who main
tain that the American negro now has a ma
tive capacity equal to that of the average
white that it has been repressed by slavery
and Subsequent forces, rut when the press
ure is removed 1t rebounds with an elasticity
that carries the negro forward faster than
the white. They deny emphatilally that
the white majority operates as an impulive
force on the blacks; ON the contrary, they
say it is repressive, that it makes the negro
feel inferior, lowers his self-esteem, and so
retards him They deny that the negro Is
retrograding on the sea Islands and in the
bottoms" inhabited entirely by that race,
and claim that lie is progressing there much
faster than do the mean whites" OF the
sand-h country. They sheer at the oft
quoted examples Of Hayi and Guiana main
tanning that the so called negroes there are
nothing but mongrels-s from a
play ed-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
smalI-Pox in Japan's sIums.
An epidemic of smallpox is raging in the
crowded Sums OF Nangasakl, Japan The