The news & observer. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 1894-current, 1903-10-11

can some of the civil rights acts be ex-
planned, for their tendency to bring about
absolute social equality between the
black and the white races is obvious and
indisputable.
There is, in a word, no doubt that the
/ idea of absolute social equality between
the black and the white races, to which
amalgamation was the logical and newt
able corollary, pervaded the atmosphere
of Washington during the reconstruction
period, and that of all the Southern States
under the carpet-bag regime, so far as
| the blacks and the white emigrants from
the North were concerned. That idea was
inhaled with the air when the present
generation OF negro, was growing up to
puberty and entering on adult life. They
became infected with the belief, and the
belief was justified, that if the Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Constitutional Amendments,
and the civil rights acts founded thereon,
had any theoretical basis, and pointed
forward to any ultimate contamination,
that basis and that contamination must
be looked for in the intermarriage and
eventual fusion of the two races. Amalga-
nation, therefore, instead of being re-
garded with loathing and adherence, as
it had been by the Southern whites, was
held UP to the post-bellum generation of
negroes by their radical teachers at the
North and by their own common sense
Interpretation of constitutional and
statute laws, as at once lawful, proper,
and desirable.
Not many years elapsed, however, af-
ter the emigration of negroes from the
South to the North began, before the
opinions and the feelings of Northern
whites regarding the expediency, or even
the permissbility, of intermarriage be-
tween the races underwent a profound
and startling change Startling in the
sense that Northern radicals themselves
were shocked at the logical consequences
of the theory that had inspired their re-
construction legislation. AS for the
Southern whites, we need not say that
they had never ceased to view amalgama-
ton with disgust and horror What we
would here indicate, however, is that in
the new negro crime, we behold the fruc-
hold the modification period, an
tifcation of the idea planted in the minds
OF the colored men during the recon
expect to see instantaneously uprooted
merely because the Northern radicals who
statute legislation of the reconstruction
period was founded is in process of ex-
tinction, if not utterly extinct, and that
the faces of white men at the North, as
at the South, are set like flint against the
intermarriage of the races negro is now
and then provoked to assert by violence
the right to a cohabitation that is either
forbidden by law or prohibited by public
sentiment.
In this way only are we able to ex-
plain the phenomenon presented by the
crime that we are discussing, a phenome-
non which is at once modern and local
1t is modern because, before the recon
struction period. the black man never
looked upon marriage or cohabitation
with a white woman as conceivable, much
less as warranted by the theory of law
1t is local, because in the Spanish and
Portuguese speaking countries on this side
of the Atlantic it is unnecessary for a
negro to resort to force, for the reason
that the intermarriage, or voluntary CO.
habltation of whites and blacks is neither
prohibited by law nor condemned by pub
lie sentiment.
If we are right in our diagnosis of the
conditions under which the new negro
crime arose, we may reasonably expect to
see 1t vanish when those conditions shall
have disappeared. AS we have formerly
pointed out, it has vanished already in
Mississippi, where the negro has learned
that, whatever may have been the theory
that inspired reconstruction legislation, the
black man i'll that State is not the poll
tlcal, much less the social, equal of the
white. The crime is likely to vanish else
where when the same hard. but indispen-
sable, lesson is driven home.