Rope & Faggot/Chapter 6

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Herbert Adolphus Miller, Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University, delivered at Denver in 1925 a needed warning to those who are inclined too hastily to accept preliminary findings of workers in various branches of the sciences, results which, though often significant, are in reality but the first steps towards knowledge. His words were especially directed against those who, to reinforce preconceived notions of race, pompously utter dogmatic conclusions that are based on insufficient and often faulty laboratory findings. "There is also," said Professor Miller, "the appropriation of the scientific jargon by the totally unscientific who rationalize their prejudices and think that God intended it so because they can say it in scientific terms."^[1]

Professor Miller added another warning of value: "Another popular tendency is to transfer emotional adherence from religion to science, and then to become ​as orthodox and dogmatic as the most fundamentalist of religions. The scientist may be both bigoted and intolerant. There is this difference from religion, however, that the scientific method prevents staying long at one place, so that while scientists may be petty and narrow their total ultimate result is enlarging and constructive."^[2]

There is no field in which scientists, both real and pseudo ones, have probed that reveals more clearly than the race problem the soundness of Professor Miller's observations and the need for his warnings. The Stoddards, McDougalls, Grants, and Brighams have utilized science to prove that God or Gobineau long ago made inferior all possessors of non-white skins. But promptly scientists and scholars worthy of the name, such as Mall and Pearl and Boas and Goldenweiser and Lowie, have exposed the falsity or the insufficiency of the evidence upon which the pseudo-scientists have based their "proof" of Negro inferiority.

Unfortunately for the United States, the vogue which such books as The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy have had has done much towards the inculcation of prejudice and fear among those who would not consider joining such a movement as the Ku Klux Klan. There is the human propensity to believe those things that coincide with one's prejudices and interests, and the equally human inclination to disregard ​all evidence, however sound and unquestionable, which runs contrary to those prejudices and interests. Thus the Klan recruited the more rowdy element, and the Nordic movement those of slightly higher mental calibre—and between them profoundly influenced the already tense racial situation in the United States and added to the antagonisms from which such a phenomenon as lynchings arises. The lyncher, the Klansman, the Nordicist, the disfranchiser, the opponent of advancement of the Negro or other dark-skinned race, found in books such as Stoddard's comforting assurance of the fundamental soundness of their prejudices. "Scientific jargon" which they did not know was jargon assured them that the Negro is inferior and that it is therefore for the general good to "keep him in his place."

Speaking of theories of the relative ability of various races which are based on brain weights and conformations, Sir Arthur Keith, president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in a conversation in London in 1927, declared that he would not go to the biologist or the anthropologist, but to the social philosopher, in seeking an answer to the question of relative superiority or inferiority. "For what is superiority?" he asked. "For life in London I undoubtedly have advantages over the native of central Africa. But put us both down in his own land and it is doubtful if I could survive while he would. Who then ​can say whether he or I is superior? There is no possible way to determine absolutely what is superiority or who is superior to anybody else—it all depends on circumstances and opportunities."

The distinguished American biologist, Professor Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins University, expresses a similar point of view in a letter to the writer. "On the broad question of racial superiority and inferiority I have repeatedly in my writings urged caution. That various races are biologically different is an obvious fact, but to assert that one is superior or inferior to another at once gets one into deep water from a philosophical point of view, because it all depends upon who decided upon the yard-stick by which superiority shall be measured. Furthermore, equality of opportunity is something that, broadly speaking, never exists in the comparison of large racial groups. This has led me to take the position that discussion of the relative superiority or inferiority of races is a futile business. My reaction always is to urge people to talk about something else where there is perhaps some hope of arriving somewhere. It is a problem which is incapable of final resolution in terms of variables which do not involve fundamentally emotion, taste, and prejudices. And, as was long ago pointed out, it is no good discussing taste."

It is almost a tragic circumstance that such reasoned and temperate conclusions as these gain circulation at but a fraction of the speed of those which sow the seed ​of racial hatreds and antagonisms. It is also deplorable that especially in the United States prejudices flame into being, and with such hysterical venom that they all but overwhelm those who counsel sanity and scientific accuracy. Of all the ideas that cause race hatred there is probably none which has been so dangerous as Nordicism in its various forms and manifestations. Those who claim to belong to that rather vaguely defined class have, of course, contributed largely to civilization. The danger lies in the propensity to exaggeration, in claiming that every human being from the garden of Eden who accomplished anything was Nordic, and in asserting that nothing worth while has ever been done by a person who did not belong to this select group.

Those in the United States whose efforts have been of especial harm to the Negro and who, in one fashion or another, have helped to fertilize and perpetuate ideas of Negro inferiority can be divided roughly into four groups. At the lowest end of the scale is the Ku Klux Klan. Next are those who are slightly more erudite and respectable and by the margin of that superiority to the Klan more dangerous—Stoddard, McDougall, Grant, and others less well known, whose arguments are persuasive and printed. Then come the scientists like Robert Bennett Bean of the University of Virginia, who, backed by imposing pages of figures and bewildering charts, seek by brain weights and convolutions to ​establish the inferiority of the Negro brain, and, of course, the superiority of the white brain. Finally, there come those who have no patience with the Nordicists, who reject all their "proofs" and demonstrate their unsoundness, but who fall victim to some of the very same prejudices that afflict the Nordic doctrinaires. Into this class fall such men as Frank H. Hankins, Professor of Economics and Sociology at Smith College, whose The Racial Basis of Civilization so thoroughly riddles the exponents of Aryan or Nordic theories, from Gobineau and Chamberlain down to Stoddard.

The immense number of persons reached by the arguments of these various groups, and the effect which their theories have had on the race problem and the question of lynch-law, necessitates at least brief consideration of them. Of the Ku Klux Klan—the "extreme form of Protestant nationalism" Professor Siegfried terms it—little need be said here. Newspapers, magazines, and books have been filled with charges and counter charges regarding it. Internal dissension within the movement, the apprehension of some of its highest officials in crimes of moral turpitude, and the reaction of the saner if more sluggish elements of Americans have hastened the downfall of this movement and the disillusionment of its dupes. Deserted by the less unintelligent men who joined it, the Klan has fallen into the control of the lower type—the very criminal element ​that the Klan asserted it was opposing—and we thus have the lawless definitely organized for vengeance and ruthless pursuit of their own ends.

The significance of such a movement is that the Klan was, first, the direct-action expression of a most dangerous doctrine of superiority which many Americans hold who are too respectable or too timid to translate it into violent action; and, second, that the reign of whippings, tarrings and featherings, lynchings, and other outrages furnished a sorely needed if obvious example for the United States of the manner in which intolerance can spread. Just as the Klan was in post-Civil-War days against the Negro, so primarily was the post-World-War Klan designed to "handle" Negro soldiers returning from fighting for democracy in Europe. It is to be questioned, however, if even that lesson was sufficient to warn against the bigotry which seems to thrive so rankly in the United States. "The critical sense is not the most highly developed in America," says Professor Siegfried; and when the honest American views the growth of bureaucracy, the abridgment of rights of free speech, free press, and free assembly, the vast extent of intolerance and bigotry, and the willingness to engage in actual or potential lynching which have developed so alarmingly within recent years in the United States, he must accord at least shamed agreement with Professor Siegfried's statement. Even of such honest men there are but a few who realize that a con​siderable portion of this intolerance is the direct result of the habit of lynching and bigotry which has been directed against the Negro. The Ku Klux Klan, therefore, is but a concrete example of the price that not only the South, but the entire country, is paying for lynching.

The Nordicists, under the fire of sound scientific criticism, are not far behind the Klan in being exposed and ridiculed. Also like the Klan, they have not been convinced of their absurdities, one fears, but are merely more discreet and less brazen in the parading of the virtues which they claim to possess exclusively. The ballyhoo experts of a blue-eyed, blond-haired, dolichocephalic superman are not as articulate as they were immediately after the end of the World War, but there is ample evidence that the seed sown did not fall upon barren ground.

It is a most revelatory experience to note how closely the Nordic propaganda has coincided with the eras of exploitation of coloured peoples by white nations. It was no accident that in the nineties the ideas of Gobineau should gain popularity simultaneously with the beginnings of modern imperialism. Nor was it by chance that the revived Klan and the popularity of books by Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard should grow simultaneously after the World War. One can easily understand how all of these movements had their roots firmly grounded in economic advantage. Fear—most of it ​imaginary—whipped up to the point of fury hatred first of the Negro, and later of Catholics, Jews, foreigners, and every other group which might conceivably endanger the position of those who imagined themselves to be of unmixed Nordic blood.

One wonders why those who revealed such fears seemed at the same time to be so lacking in common sense or confidence in their superiority. It would seem that, upon reflection, the fact would occur to the boasters that each human being possesses a total of 65,534 ancestors within only fifteen generations—a mother and father, two grandmothers and two grandfathers, eight great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, and so on through geometrical progression to the total given. If a generous estimate is allowed of thirty years to a generation, this means that so great a number of persons within a period of just 450 years have contributed to the blood-stream of each of us; and if Sir Arthur Keith is correct in his estimate that "man has the respectable antiquity of a million years," who can know what his "race" really is?

Such a humbling and self-evident fact seems not to have occurred to the majority of those who led the Nordic parade. In its various forms the doctrine of the superiority of the white, blond dolichocephalic added mightily in tenseness to an already over-tense racial situation. A bigoted, ruthless reign in the United States of fanatics sworn to persecution of all whom they did ​not like or approve—and Negroes were but one of the objects of that intolerance—was but narrowly averted and the danger of its recurrence is not yet past. It is not beyond belief that there may come the ironic situation of control of America by a Protestant, white, gentile, "Nordic" oligarchy, with ruthless suppression of all other elements—there was for a time apparent certainty that the United States was headed for that state. Perhaps then, if such states as Mississippi be examples of the result of such dominance, and only then will the United States fully comprehend the fruits of race pride and conceit and their inevitable accompaniments—the lawlessness and bigotry which find outlet in, among other ways, lynch-law.

Closely allied with the efforts of the Klan and the Nordicists and playing a not unimportant part in the creation of a national psychology towards the Negro are the various attempts to prove Negro inferiority by brain weight or structure. From almost the beginning of the study of the human brain efforts have been made to prove that the brains of so-called inferior races—and, in the United States particularly, the brain of the Negro—are of a "simple and embryonic type." A. J. Parker in 1878 asserted and sought to prove that the Negro's brain bore an unmistakably closer relationship to that of the ape than to that of the white man, but his ​work was soon discredited by Tiedemann, Luschke, Marshall, and Mall who demonstrated that Parker was careless, superficial, scientifically incorrect, and animated by an obvious prejudice.

In 1906 Robert Bennett Bean of the University of Virginia published the results of a study which he had made of the brains of 103 Negroes and forty-nine whites taken from the bodies of derelicts unclaimed at death in the Baltimore morgue. The psychological approach of Bean to his study can best be learned from his statement that "there is less respect for the dead among Negroes" and that therefore the Negro brains examined were from the better class of Negroes, and their weights and measurements were fair averages for the entire race; while the white brains were from "only the lowest classes of whites . . . especially among the women, who are apt to be prostitutes." In a letter to the writer Professor Bean states that "the Negro brains were largely of the true Negro type of Central Africa and the Congo and West Coast, although some of them were undoubtedly of mixed origin, part white," which is, at best, a somewhat risky assertion when one considers the source of the bodies from which the brains were taken; while "the white brains were of the submerged tenth of the City of Baltimore."

It probably did not occur to Bean that the truth might be precisely the opposite of his generalization as to "less respect for the dead among Negroes" and the Ne​gro brains' being a fair average for the race. Negroes are inclined to membership in burial societies or they carry insurance upon their lives to provide decent burial. Likewise there is a marked tendency towards charity among Negroes to save one of their own from burial in the potter's field, and especially from the dreaded dissecting-table.

But, leaving such considerations aside, Bean reported that "the average brain weight is greatest in the Caucasian male, least in the Negro female, and intermediate in the Negro male and the Caucasian female."^[3] Dr. Franklin P. Mall of Johns Hopkins University, who had suggested that Bean make the study, was not satisfied with Bean's findings, and weighed and studied the brains himself. "In order to exclude my own personal equation," he wrote later of his results, "which is an item of considerable importance in a study like this, all of the tracings as well as the measurements . . . were made without my knowing the race or sex of any of the individuals from which the brains were taken. The brains were identified from the laboratory records just before the results were tabulated."^[4] (Italics ours.)

Dr. Mall found, with the labels removed, that Bean had overweighed the white brains and underweighed the Negro ones. In brief, the "personal equation" apparently played a considerable part, a clear example of ​Dr. Pearl's "it all depends upon who decided upon the yard-stick by which superiority shall be measured."

Dr. Mall reported in the American Journal of Anatomy the differences he found between the weights and measurements of Bean and his own. "My figures do not confirm Bean's result that the genu is relatively larger and the splenium relatively smaller in the white than in the Negro brain. The specimens I examined include 18 brains which Bean studied, and I find that the measurements I made of the areas of the genu and splenium in them do not agree altogether with his. . . . I think my chart shows conclusively, as far as possible with the method I employed, that there is no variation in either genu or splenium of the corpus callosum due to either race or sex. . . . I must therefore conclude that with the methods at our disposal it is impossible to detect a relative difference in the weight or size of the frontal lobe due to either race or sex, and that probably none exists. . . . The study has been still further complicated by the personal equation of the investigator. Arguments for difference due to race, sex and genius will henceforward need to be based upon new data, really scientifically treated and not on the older statements."

Not only has Mall's call for new data been answered, but much of that data has exploded various pet theories of the near-scientists, such as assumptions of correlation between brain weight and intelligence, between ​physical characters and intelligence, and between shape of head and mental agility. An amusing feature of the last named is the boast of the Nordics of dolichocephaly—and the fact that the Negro is the most dolichocephalous of races!

Of possible correlation between brain weight and intelligence Raymond Pearl concluded, basing his conclusions on five series of brain weightings representing Swedish, Hessian, Bavarian, Bohemian, and English sub-races of man and including altogether the weights of 2100 adult male and 1034 adult female brains, that "the degree of the correlation between brain-weight and intelligence is indeterminate, with the probability that it is sensibly equal to zero. That is, brain-weight and intelligence in the sense of mental capacity are probably not sensibly correlated. . . . There are definite racial types in brain-weight. The differences between racial groups in this character are only in part to be accounted for by differences in other characters of the body."^[5]

Those who seek to find in the Negro's biological differences from the white evidence of mental inferiority will find little comfort in the study made by Karl Pearson, F. R. S., of head measurements of upwards of a thousand Cambridge graduates and of considerably more than five thousand schoolchildren. He concluded ​that "the onus of proof that other measurements and more subtle psychical observations would lead to more definite results may . . . be left to those who a priori regard such an association as probable. Personally, the result of the present enquiry has convinced me that there is little relationship between the external physical and the psychical characters in man"; and he warns: "Let us hesitate on the ground of slender, or worse than slender, unscientific evidence to proclaim close association between intelligence and external physical measurements. So far there is nothing to encourage belief in such association; and if we are consistent and apply any of the dogmatic views currently held to the problem of interracial intelligence, we are led to very remarkable conclusions!"^[6]

Nor have the scientists been any kinder to the Nordic's claims that his boasted dolichocephaly is the cause of superior intelligence. Dr. G. E. Harmon of the School of Medicine of Western Reserve University concluded, after studying 5600 males from Francis Galton's Second Anthropometric Laboratory Series, that "for males the degree of association between head breadth and head length and reaction time to both sight and sound in each instance is too small to be of any service for purposes of estimation. Or, as far as the mental element in reaction time is concerned . . . the size and shape of the ​head have little if any association with the working of the brain."^[7] (Italics ours.)

Dr. J. R. Musselman of Johns Hopkins University investigated the problem as to whether or not any relation can be found between head size or shape and mental agility, as represented by reaction times to sight and sound, studying 1850 individuals between the ages of three and seventy-six, and reached the same conclusions as Dr. Harmon. He reports: "As far as cephalic index is concerned . . . the correlation ratio is insignificant for both reaction times, or mental agility is not associated with either brachycephaly or dolichocephaly. . . . While there is a small amount of correlation between head breadth and reaction time to sound, its intensity is so slight as to be of no prognostic value."^[8]

Let us return to Bean's effort to prove that Negro brains must be different from and inferior to white brains, for which, as has been seen, there is no scientific proof worthy of the name. The effect of Bean's study is perhaps most clearly seen in its effect upon so sound a scientist as Professor Frank H. Hankins of Smith College. In 1926 Hankins published his excellent The Racial Basis of Civilization, one of the most thorough, ​painstaking, and informed expositions yet written of the fallacies upon which the Nordic doctrine is based. When, however, towards the end of his book, Hankins comes to a discussion of relative brain weight and conformation of white and Negro brains in a chapter entitled "Are Races Equal?" he accepts and quotes Bean as an authority—apparently unaware of Mall's exposure in 1906 of the bias and incorrectness of Bean's figures and conclusions. Hankins states: "Bean found that his negro brains showed a mode or center of greatest frequency between 1100 and 1200 grams while for his white brains the mode lay above 1300"; and later he reaches the conclusion that "it seems possible to say that there is no respect whatever in which white and negro are equal,—physically, intellectually or emotionally."^[9]

In further substantiation of his conclusion Hankins quotes Spitzka's comparison in the matter of cranial capacity to the effect that "of 64 eminent men . . . the cranial capacity was 1650 cubic centimeters on an average, or 100 above the average for Parisians and 173 above that for negroes as given by Boule"^[10]—regarding which Professor Pearl declares that "the Spitzka comparison is utterly meaningless and deserves no consideration whatever." One cannot escape the conviction that Hankins in his conclusions and in his acceptance of the discredited and worthless evidence of such men as ​Bean and Spitzka was either much influenced by "the personal equation" or did not know of the work of abler and less biased scientists than those upon whose work he relies.

Hankins's conclusions are all the more amazing in view of his statements regarding that question which so sorely agitates American minds—intermarriage. Hankins asserts unequivocally: "Even as regards white-negro crosses one can see no sound biological argument against them," since "the progeny, representing as they do a blend of ancestral characteristics, have their qualities determined not by some mysterious influence of race mixture, but rather by the genetic factors of their ancestors regardless of race."^[11] But Bean, quoted and considered by Hankins as an authority, is convinced that "the tall, fair-skinned Negro (or mulatto), of the enterprising nature," is "the most dangerous of all characters to human society."^[12]

Elsewhere Bean asserts that mulattos forming the bulk of the serving class in Virginia and North Carolina and who are descendants of Kaffir and Hamitic or Semitic crossings are "particularly noted for their height and intelligence, but are deceptive and dishonest, although they make good body-servants and house-servants"; that of three types of mulattos one is made up of those with all Negro features except colour; an​other, distinguished by "a peculiar mottling of the skin," is "inferior physically and mentally"; and the two classes "represent one of the gravest menaces to society. . . . They seem to inherit all the bad of both black and white." A third class of mulattos so nearly resembles the Caucasian that "one has to look twice to be sure"; but "they are almost invariably of a delicate mold, and die young." Yet in the same article Bean, asserting that Negro brains are deficient, compared with the white, in nerve-cells and nerve-fibres, declares that "the possibilities of developing the negro are therefore limited, except by crossing with other races"; that "having demonstrated that the negro and the Caucasian are widely different in characteristics, due [sic] to a deficiency of gray matter and connecting fibers in the negro brain . . . a deficiency that is hereditary and can be altered only by intermarriage, we are forced to conclude that it is useless to try to elevate the negro by education or otherwise, except in the direction of his natural endowments"; and, finally, that "it is evident that the brain of the American negro weighs more than the native African, which is no doubt because of the greater amount of white blood in the American negro."^[13]

Here we have a bewildering example of much of the reasoning on the alleged inferiority of the Negro—first, the mulatto is "deceptive," "dishonest," "inferior physically and mentally," and "dangerous" and he "almost ​invariably" dies young the nearer he approaches the Caucasian; and, second, the only hope of making anything at all of the poor Negro lies in intermarriage and crossing with other races! Such logic reminds one of the statement of a character in Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage who declared: "I thought it was only in revealed religion that a mistranslation improved the sense."

Nor is Hankins much less reluctant than Bean to give pontifical judgments that are both loose and inaccurate. He asserts that "under favorable circumstances few negro children finish high school work successfully, and fewer still complete a college course"—a statement which at best is a generalization in view of the large number of Negroes who each year are completing the courses of colleges and universities, to say nothing of high schools, facts which Hankins could have secured with very little effort. More, it is well known that these graduated, not under "favorable circumstances," but in the face of severe economic and other handicaps, such as, for many of them, the hostility of white fellow-students. Hankins also declares: "It may well be doubted whether there could be found any pure negroes who, if brought up under the most favoring circumstances, could develop the intellectual powers necessary to carry on the higher cultural activities of this country"—another loose generalization, incapable of proof in the face of prejudice which makes "favoring circumstances" for ​Negroes almost coincidental with the millenium; and, like the statement about Negro graduates, a statement of which much can be presented in refutation, such as eminent Negroes with little if any white blood—Robert Russa Moton, Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, Claude McKay, John Hurst, William Pickens, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lucy Laney, Mary McLeod Bethune, George W. Carver, Robert S. Abbott, Eric Walrond, for example—and many others less famous. Here are black men and women of national fame and some of international reputation who in the arts, education, sciences, journalism, and administrative fields stand as refutation of Hankins's sweeping statement.

More attention has been given to such statements of Bean and Hankins than is deserved, when one takes into account the work of less biased scientists who have found results so much at variance with those of these two men. This has been done not because of their importance, but because they are more or less typical of a certain type of "scientific" thinking which has intensified the anti-Negro psychology so prevalent in the United States. Though remote, such reinforcement of prejudice plays a not insignificant part in making lynching, unequal educational and industrial opportunities, and other forms of race oppression possible.

It is certain that no conclusions regarding the Negro brain, whether those conclusions be absolute or relative, are worth very much until examination by unbiased and ​competent scientists is made of a sufficiently large number of Negro brains. It is obviously most important that such studies be made of the brains of Negroes who are above the rank of criminals, prostitutes, paupers, mental defectives, and other lower elements of the race. "We have no good series of Negro brain weights," says Dr. Pearl, "though we have several excellent series for whites, but not for whites in America." Thus when it was popular to base notions of racial ability upon brain weights, before that theory was discredited, the brains of men eminent in science, literature, and other fields demanding extraordinary ability and attainment, and of students at universities such as Cambridge were weighed—and from the results an average weight for the white brain was secured. Against these a few hundred brains of unknown and of the very lowest types of Negroes were weighed—and the result determined the average for all Negroes!

A severe blow was struck in 1928 at those who have sought to prove inferiority or superiority by means of relative brain weightings and conformations by Dr. Henry H. Donaldson of the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology. Dr. Donaldson made, with the aid of Myrtelle M. Canavan of the Wistar Institute, a study of the brains of three eminent scholars—Dr. G. Stanley Hall, Sir William Osler, and Edward Sylvester Morse. In the Journal of Comparative Neurology for August 1928 (Vol. 46, No. 1) Dr. Donaldson reported that he had ​been unable to find that the brains of these superior men differed markedly from those of ordinary men—"the brain, after death," he asserts, "is therefore but the crude machine lacking power and controls, and although the convolutions differ somewhat, yet, in view of the controlling numerical and quantitative conditions, variations in the convolutions can hardly be used to explain mental traits and abilities as between persons of ordinary and superior intelligence." As for the size of brains, "good growth yields not only a larger brain, but implies good nutritive conditions that favour functional activity," Dr. Donaldson concludes. As for nerve tissue, he declares that "unknown are the individual chemistry of the nerve tissue in each brain, the intimate connections between the neurons and the blood in all of its relations. These unknowns constitute the power and regulators for the brain as a machine."

In brief, it is Dr. Donaldson's conclusion after study of the brains of these three men of unusual ability that brain weightings, convolutions, and sizes mean very little in so far as they reveal superior or inferior mental ability in the light of present knowledge.

For whatever the results may be worth, it is to be hoped that the methodology of the past will be abandoned and not only that qualified and unprejudiced experts may study a sufficient number of Negro brains to make their findings valuable and trustworthy, but that, as with whites, such studies may take into consideration ​heredity, education, achievement, economic status, physical condition at time of death, and the myriad other factors which apparently determine so largely brain conformation. Such studies, replacing those of unknown Negroes, obviously would be the only ones which would offer a safe and fair basis for comparison with the studies of the brains of gifted whites.

Most of the old figures are precisely as valuable as would be a comparison of the brains of one hundred derelicts from London slums with those of an equal number of Indians of the type of Gandhi, Tagore, and men of like ability, with a conclusion based on such figures that Englishmen were hopelessly inferior. Or, to bring the hypothetical comparison even closer, to compare the brains of a given number of "Nordics" from the backwoods of Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee with those of a selected group of gifted Negroes such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, Paul Robeson, George W. Carver, Mordecai W. Johnson, Ernest Everett Just, Roland Hayes, and Robert Russa Moton. Whatever its scientific value, such a comparison might at least offer opportunity for Gargantuan laughter.

As biology and anthropology have been used to attempt to prove the physical inferiority of the Negro, so has psychology been turned, at times, to the same end. ​"In the past decade," to quote Dr. Miller's Denver address again, "psychology has achieved an immense importance. It now talks as though it were grown up while it is still only a very vigorous adolescent." And nowhere does psychology speak with greater assurance than in the matter of so-called intelligence tests. It is certain that from such tests, fairly and intelligently applied, valuable hints as to the ability of the examined may be gained. Unfortunately, the American passion for regimentation and "efficiency" hampers the slow process of finding out exactly what can be learned from such tests. We are eager, once a few facts are in hand, to assume and to proclaim that the most minute reaction of the examined mentality is in our possession—especially if the few preliminary facts bear out ideas and prejudices we already possessed before the tests were made.

"Any conclusions drawn from the so-called intelligence tests," says Professor Pearl, "as to the relative intellectual status of individuals and groups are at best suggestive, and in no sense final"; and such an attitude is obviously the only safe and intelligent one to take. Otherwise too hasty conclusions cause, in some instances, discomfort and embarrassment. Such was the fate of Professor C. C. Brigham of Princeton, who sought to prove Negro inferiority by means of the results of the army mental tests. In his Study of American Intelligence Brigham proved, at least to his own satisfaction, that Negro draftees were of the average intelligence of a ​nine-year-old against an average of twelve years for whites. When confronted with the evidence that Northern Negroes were considerably superior to Southern whites, superior educational and economic advantages playing so important a role, Brigham demonstrated extraordinary agility in reaching the conclusion that such figures proved that the Negroes in question were "exceptions" and must have white blood.

Brigham's embarrassment was no less than that of the school authorities of a large Southern city, who, in accordance with modern ideas of education, engaged expert psychologists to test all pupils, white and black, in the public schools. To their dismay the tests proved the Negro children superior. It is hardly necessary to add that the results were promptly suppressed!

The danger of generalizations based upon such inquiries as in the army Binet test may best be seen by examining some of the problems presented in wholesale lots to the soldiers and upon which conclusions were confidently based by Brigham and others. A few of these tests are so patently absurd when applied to some of the individuals examined that the hasty reader might be inclined to dismiss all the tests without further thought. For example, pictures of a tennis-court without a net and of an electric light bulb with the centre filaments missing were placed before the subject, and his quickness in discovering what was missing was measured. The task obviously would be simple, for example, ​to a drafted man from, let us say, New York or Chicago, where tennis-courts and electric lights are not uncommon. Imagine, if you will, the plight of the draftee, white or Negro, from, let us suppose, rural Mississippi. Tennis-courts and electric illumination being much less common there than in a Northern city, he would of necessity take longer to name the missing parts, if he was able to do so at all. Confronted with a picture of a one-handled plough or a wickless oil lamp, he would probably, on the basis of that question alone, rate higher in perceptual ability than a New York or Chicago youth to whom a plough or an oil lamp would be relatively foreign.

Horace Mann Bond details the general attitude of some of those who "play the major indoor sport among psychologists" of testing Negro children. "If Negro children make lower scores than white (having already discounted the influence of social status), they are inferior, they were born that way and though we had a sneaking suspicion that this was the fact all along, we are now able to fortify our prejudices with a vast array of statistical tables, bewildering vistas of curves and ranges and distributions and the other cabalistic phrases with which we clothe the sacred profession of Psychology from the view of the profane public."^[14] Bond, however, examined an unselected group of Negro children from professional, middle-class and labouring ​homes, keeping in mind environment as a possible factor instead of discounting it. He used with scrupulous attention the most approved testing and statistical technique and sometimes "'leaned over backward' . . . in order to maintain 'scientific' accuracy." Bond used the original Binet-Simon test in the form revised by Professor Lewis Terman of Leland Stanford University. With approximate normality ranking as 100, Bond found that sixty-three per cent of the thirty children examined made scores of above 106 (according to Terman only thirty-three per cent of white children may be expected to make such a score); forty-seven per cent of the Negro children exceeded an I. Q. score of 122 (Terman states that only five per cent of white children may be expected to equal or exceed such a score); while forty-two per cent of the Negro children had an I. Q. of above 125, which score Terman estimates that only three per cent of white children may be expected to possess. More, twenty-six per cent of the Negro children rated above 130, a most select group, which Terman estimates not more than one per cent of whites reaches; and one Negro girl made the astounding figure of 142.

These remarkable findings are significant. Do they prove that Negro children are much superior to white? Not at all, though such a claim might have been made had Bond possessed the same general willingness to jump to conclusions and to deduce racial characteristics from individual tests which characterizes Brigham and ​his school. They simply indicate that it is a precarious business to generalize about racial mental ability.

Briefly, what is the nature and extent of the evidence to date upon which notions of racial mental differences and capacities are based? As long ago as 1910 R. L. Woodworth in an article appearing in Science disposed of the popular myth that so-called primitive races have greater acuity of sight, smell, or hearing when compared with civilized races, and of the corresponding notion that civilized peoples excelled in such other mental traits as reasoning power. "We are probably justified in inferring," he concluded, "from the results cited that the sensory and motor processes, and the elementary brain activities, the differing in degree from one individual to another, are about the same from one race to another."

So much for the psycho-physical tests. In the field of psychological tests many have worked and much has been published based upon that work. Careful and unbiased students, however, realize that there are so many elements which go into the making of the "racial mind," and the individual mind as well, that it is exceedingly unwise, if not dishonest, to lay down any broad and fast rules. In truth, only the outermost edges of this vast field have as yet been touched, though, to hear some of the experimenters speak, one might infer that nothing remained to be discovered. Some of these have ignored the economic status, the extent and quality of school facili​ties, the mental and cultural family backgrounds, the influence of prejudice and similar vital factors in shaping the mental attitudes and responses of Negroes examined. Then when some of these Negroes have been found to have a lower intelligence quotient, such deficiencies have promptly been termed proof of racial inferiority.

In addition to the army tests there have been some twenty or more studies on about 3500 Negro subjects ranging in age from five to thirty-five years of age. These include Strong and Morse's study of 125 Negro schoolchildren in Columbia, South Carolina, where the remarkable premise was laid down that the educational facilities of the white and coloured children were the same—which must have been surprising even to the school authorities of that Southern city. They found Negroes inferior to whites, but, in pursuing their inquiries, learned that the difference between city whites and mill whites was almost the same as that between Negroes and whites as a whole. The investigators promptly concluded that the mill whites were inferior because of poorer social and economic advantages, but that the Negroes' lower rating was due to racial inferiority!

In New Orleans 116 Negro and 112 white children of Irish, German, Italian, and French nationality of about the same economic and social circumstances as the Negro children were examined by D. Summe in ​1917, using the Binet and Yorkes Point scales. Summe discovered that, on the whole, sex differences were much greater than the racial ones and that coloured girls made higher averages than the white boys. He also learned that the Negro children had a keener sense of observation, flatly contradicting Strong's and Morse's findings, in which they said they had found Negro children to be deficient in this respect.

Other studies have been made by Phillips in Philadelphia, Murdock in New York City, Pressey and Teter in Indiana, Odum in Philadelphia, Schwegler and Win in Kansas, Ferguson in Virginia, Willis Clark in Los Angeles, and a number of others. Goldstein studied and measured over three hundred coloured boys and girls and found that the differences between white boys and girls were greater than the difference between the coloured and white groups. Stetson gave memory tests to five hundred white and an equal number of Negro children in the fourth and fifth grades of Washington schools. On finding the coloured children lower in school studies he considered no other factors and assumed the inferiority to be due to deficient reasoning power. Pyle learned from a study made in three Missouri towns that Negro children approached the white norm in the same degree as their social and economic status.

Ferguson of Virginia tested 486 whites and 421 Negroes between the ages of nine and twenty-one. He gave ​four tests to determine extent of logical inference and reasoning or controlled association, comprehension of meaning, attention, perception, and discriminative reaction, and of motor co-ordination, speed, and accuracy. Although Ferguson did not discuss environmental differences, his results show that the whites excelled on mixed relations and completion tests, that coloured girls were superior to white boys in the cancellation tests, and that in the maze tests no racial differences were found. Of the four tests there was considerable overlapping and the two tests in which whites excelled were in fields distinctly influenced by formal education—and Ferguson did not go into the vast difference between the school facilities afforded by Virginia to its white and to its Negro children. Professor Robert E. Park of the University of Chicago severely criticized some of Ferguson's deductions and conclusions as to Negro inferiority, pointing out not only the notorious inferiority of schools provided by Southern states for coloured children, and the lower salaries paid Negro teachers, but that the economic handicaps of the Negro parents resulted in poorer food and, where the mother was forced to work, less home training.

The army studies constitute the largest array of data yet made. They reveal that the Southern Negro is as inferior to the Northern one as Negroes as a whole are to whites as a whole. Even more dismaying to those who seek to prove Negro mental inferiority is the reve​lation already noted which embarrassed Brigham of Princeton—that Northern Negroes are superior to Southern whites.

One of the most valuable series of psychological tests given to Negro and white children is that made by Willis W. Clark in Los Angeles in 1923. A summary of Mr. Clark's findings was given in the Educational Research Bulletin for November 12, 1923, published by the Los Angeles City Schools. Five hundred Negro children in five elementary schools were given certain mental and educational tests, and the results were compared with those obtained from the same tests given to the pupils of fifteen representative Los Angeles elementary schools. Comparison of the intelligence level revealed that "the median I. Q.'s and the distribution of intelligence over the various classificatory groups indicate that there is no significant difference shown in the intelligence level of the Negro children and that of children in the fifteen schools taken as a whole." The second test demonstrated that "the average accomplishment and range of accomplishment for Negro children are practically the same as for the total population of the fifteen schools."

Application of the Thorndike-McCall Reading Scale to test reading comprehension brought out that "the average ability for all Negro children tested was 0.203 of a grade below the norm, while that for pupils in ​forty elementary schools was 0.016 of a grade below norm. This is not a significant variation."

The Woody-McCall Fundamentals test of arithmetical ability revealed that "the average ability for all Negro children examined was 0.103 of a grade above the norm, while that for pupils in forty elementary schools was 0.38 of a grade above norm. The difference represents a little less than three months school work."

The Modified Ayres Spelling Test disclosed that the Negro children were 0.973 of a grade and white children in forty schools 0.79 of a grade below norm and that "although the Negro children are nearly a whole grade retarded in spelling ability, the situation is not materially different for the total school population."

In brief, such minor differences as were found would seem to suggest the possibility of the disparity being partly if not wholly attributable to differences in economic and other opportunities of the white and Negro children.

Only one thing can safely be determined from the tests made and material gathered to date on the intelligence of either whites or Negroes and that is that social status, economic circumstance, environment, racial and other prejudices (or lack of such prejudices), and a host of other factors enter into the equation with enormous weight. It is probable that whatever differences have been found between whites and Negroes are ​due to these factors far more than to any differences due to race if not entirely so. Such a conclusion seems well founded when one considers such studies as that made by Yerkes and Anderson of one thousand cases of whites, all of whose parents spoke English, from which study it was concluded that "difference in economic or social status can be correlated with different mental capacities, that difference being as much as thirty per cent." So with the study of city and country children, all of them white, which Pressey and Thomas made, where it was learned that the city children rated higher than country children and, more, that country children from the good farming districts were superior to those from poor ones.

As the technique of mental measurements is perfected, as means are found of eliminating the personal equation of the investigator himself in such studies, and as our present fragmentary knowledge of racial traits and psychology is enlarged, we may in time hope to determine what differences, if any, are due solely to race. Until that time has come, any conclusions are unwise at best, if not positively dangerous in the matter of race relations. Discrimination, injustice, brutality, and even lynchings are beyond all doubt due in part to the racial self-esteem of whites and their attitude towards those whom the pseudo-scientists have dubbed inferior, which has sprung from such false conclusions. ​

The data given in the preceding pages does not pretend by any means to present an exhaustive picture of scientific and near-scientific investigations of Negro mentality. Enough has been given, it is hoped, to indicate the nature of some of the best and some of the poorest inquiries into this difficult subject. It is also hoped that the reader may gain some idea of the way in which conclusions that at best are tentative have been used to increase prejudice against the Negro.

In the matter of the absolute and relative importance of brain convolutions it is certain that there is an insufficiency of accurate information about Negro brains, nor is there enough genuinely scientific data to justify sweeping statements as to Negro mental ability. A number of those who have made tentative investigations of the Negro brain and mental ability have been obviously animated by personal bias, and were willing and even eager to prove Negro inferiority by selecting the lowest types of Negroes for study and asserting the results thus obtained to be typical of the entire race.

There is danger in those who are thus willing to prostitute science for the purpose of affirming personal prejudices; but that danger is considerably lessened by those of genuine scientific mind who expose the meretricious work of the biased. While eventually the prej​udiced and unscientific investigators will be discredited, the immediate danger lies in their giving the sanction of science to their prejudices, which in turn bear fruit in oppression and denial of opportunity, and, in a more remote fashion, help to keep alive a spirit of intolerance that finds expression in lynch-law. Such pseudo-scientists add to the too great amount of race hatred and race bitterness already in the world and work harm on all mankind by doing so.

Bernard Shaw, if memory be not at fault, once said that English oppression of Ireland could last only so long as Englishmen could think of the Irish as childlike, amusing, and inferior beings. So too can oppression of the Negro last only so long as ideas of his biological and mental inferiority persist, for it is largely upon such ideas that invidious distinctions are based.

The scientists who seek to rationalize their anti-Negro prejudices by commencing inquiries to find data which confirm their preconceived notions of racial superiority or inferiority and who jump too hastily to conclusions that are based on incorrect, inconclusive, or insufficient evidence are likely to involve themselves in embarrassing predicaments. There are biologists, evolutionists, psychologists, and anthropologists who assert that Negro traits as represented in mysterious chromosomes are always dominant in Negro-white crosses, while the so-called white traits are recessive, thus justifying their opposition to such crosses. If these ​notions are followed to their logical conclusion, it follows that "Nordic" or "Caucasian" stock, no matter how pure or how productive of eminent thinkers, scholars, explorers, colonists, and pioneers and superior men in all fields, always bows to the "inferior" Negro chromosome. If such an interpretation be correct, the western world's genius in developing means of rapid intercommunication between various parts of the world, the perfection of the telegraph and radio and automobile and flying-machine, would seem to foretell the equally rapid conquering of the "Nordic" chromosome—a destruction of the "superior" man by means of his own "superiority."

An interesting sidelight on the influence of other interests upon science was discovered when certain documents were sought in the library at Oxford University. It was found that the needed material could not be obtained because the files of certain American scientific journals were not in that library. Considerably more than half of the efforts to prove the inferiority of the Negro brain have been made by Americans; and, to the credit of American scientists, most of the sound work to disprove the assertions of biased men of science has also been done by Americans.