University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER II
THE AMERICAN NEGRO AND THE NATIVE AFRICAN

THE stories which I heard as a child were
what the average American Negro boy is
likely to hear in regard to his African ancestors,
and my chief reasons for repeating them is
that they were very largely mistaken and need to be
corrected.

I had always heard Africa referred to as the
"Dark Continent"; I pictured it to myself as a
black, sunless region, with muddy rivers and gloomy
forests, inhabited by a people, who, like everything
else about them, were black. I supposed that the
nearer I got to the original African, the blacker I
would find him, and that all lighter coloured Negroes
I had seen were a spurious sort, whose blood had
been adulterated by mixture with some of the lighter
races. I was much surprised, therefore, to learn,
when I came to study the native races of Africa, that
the man, whom scientists believed to be the original
African, namely, the Bushman—and with him I
include his near relatives, the Dwarfs of Central
Africa—was not black but yellow; that the Negro,
the real black man, is after all merely one of the

earliest settlers of the continent, coming from somewhere
else, probably Asia, no one knows exactly
where or how.

In a recent volume upon "The Native Races of
South Africa," George W. Stow says in regard to
relations of the Bushmen and the other Negro people
of South Africa:

On the other hand it appears from native traditions
that, with the exception of the Bushmen, all the native
peoples emigrated from the North to the South.
Other traditions state that, "when their forefathers
migrated to the South, they found the land without
inhabitants, and that only the game and the Bushmen
were living in it."

It is an indication of the low estimate which the
other South African tribes put upon the Bushmen
that they did not count them as "inhabitants."

One who studies the books about Africa will read
a great deal about the true Negro who lives, as the
books tell us, in the Soudan, a part of Africa that is

often referred to as Negroland. After I had learned
that the original African was not a black man and
not a Negro, in the strict scientific sense of the word,
I was led to explore, as well as I was able by the aid
of books and maps, that part of Africa where the
Negro is supposed to be at home. I wanted to find
more about the real black man.

The true Negro, I learned, is only one section of
what is ordinarily known as the Negro race; the
other is the Bantu, a mixed people, generally brown
in colour, who were the first invaders of South Africa,
driving out the original Bushmen, and gradually
extending themselves over most of that part of the
continent below the equator.

Negroland, stretching clear across the country,
or at least from the Atlantic to the Nile, as
far north as the Desert of Sahara and as far
south as the equator, is a wide region, and there
are many different tribes and many different
types of people inhabiting it. From the North
Arab invaders and merchantmen have entered the
country and mingled with the earlier and darker
races. Wave after wave of conquest has poured
itself out over the rich lands between the desert
and the mountains that divide these inland regions
from the coast and hundreds of years of slave-raiding
have so broken up and intermingled the
different racial stocks that it is as hard for one, not
an expert, to find the "true Negro" in Africa—that

is without any mixture of foreign blood—as it is to
find the colour line in the United States.

How difficult this sometimes is I may, perhaps,
illustrate by an experience of my own a few years
ago in Alabama. I was travelling at this time with
one of our students at Tuskegee, who was very light
in colour, when we had some distance to go in a
carriage. At the end of our journey, the owner of
the carriage, who was a white man, collected fifty
cents from me but called upon the student who was
with me for a dollar. After considerable argument
and some inquiry, we discovered that it was the
rule to charge white men a dollar for the same service
for which Negroes paid only fifty cents, and my
companion had been taken for a white man. But
even after this the student was not inclined to pay the
extra price. He seemed to think fifty cents was too
much pay for being a white man, at least for so short
a time.

Upon another occasion, when an important exposition
was being held in one of our Southern states,
I recall that, in order to encourage Negroes to attend,
the exposition authorities decided that on certain
days of the week coloured people could be admitted
at half price. The white people were to pay the
regular price, fifty cents. The notion of the managers
was that many coloured people were staying
away from the exposition because they were too
poor to pay the regular entrance fee, and that if the

price were lowered on certain days large numbers,
who could not otherwise afford it, would go. The
event proved that the calculations of the managers
were correct. Large numbers of coloured people
crowded into the exposition on Negro day, but at the
end of two weeks the doorkeepers had become desperate.
They wanted to throw up their jobs because,
as they said, it was too embarrassing work to pick
out, by their colour, the black people from the white.

As an illustration of the way in which the intermingling
of the racial stocks has come about in
Africa, I may mention the fact that, when Dr. Barth,
in 1850, first visited the Negro city of Kano, which is
the most important trading centre of Western Soudan,
he found it, a place of thirty to forty thousand
inhabitants, which at certain seasons of the year
was increased to sixty thousand, divided into
numerous quarters, each of which was inhabited by
a different type of people. One quarter was devoted
almost exclusively to Arab merchants; a second was
inhabited by Fellani, the ruling class; still other
quarters were taken up by different tribes of the
subject people, among them the merchant and
manufacturing people, the Hausas. In addition to
these, there were the slaves—gathered from all
portions of the country but principally from the
tribes living near the coast—who made up nearly
half the population.[2]

I cannot now remember where I first got the idea
that a man who was dark in colour was necessarily
more ignorant and in a lower stage of civilisation
than one who was lighter. At any rate there seemed
to be a general understanding to that effect, when I
was a boy—at least among most people. Perhaps
it was due to the fact that on the plantations, as a
rule, lighter coloured slaves were more often employed
as house servants, and, because of their more
intimate association with their masters, were held
in higher esteem and had more opportunities for
advancement than the field hands. Perhaps it was
merely a reflection of the general opinion, which
slaves somehow imbibed, that everything white was
good and everything black was bad. I recall that
in the matter of religion, although, it may never have
been directly referred to, we, always understood that
God was white and the Devil was black.

In any case I grew up with the idea that in Africa
the lowest and most degraded type of man was black,
and the blacker he was the further down in the scale
of civilisation I expected him to be. The fact seems
to be that this is nowhere true in Africa. For
instance, the Hausas, the great trading people of the
Soudan, who live in walled cities and carry on a trade
extending over the whole region between the West
Coast and the Nile, are, according to Dr. Charles
Henry Robinson, "as black as any people in the
world." The Bushmen, on the other hand, who,

as I have already said, are yellow, have nowhere
risen above the hunting stage of civilisation.

No one question, I may say right here, is more
frequently asked me than this: "What is the relative
ability of the Negro of mixed and unmixed blood?"
I usually answer that my experience and observation
convince me that, where the environment has been
equally favourable, there is no difference in ability.

As an illustration I may say that at Tuskegee it has
been customary to award the honour of delivering
the valedictory address to the student making the
highest average in scholarship, industrial work and
deportment, and during a period of about twenty
years, ten of those who gained this honour were
Negroes of pure blood. I understand that at
Hampton Institute, in Virginia, where they have had
an experience covering a considerably longer period,
the same thing has been found to be true. I might
add that the late J. C. Price, during his lifetime by
all odds the leading and most prominent man of his
race in North Carolina and one of the most eloquent
men in the country, was pure black. The two leading
and most progressive men, in commercial and
business directions, in the State of Mississippi,
Isaiah T. Montgomery and Charles Banks, have no
mixture of blood. W. W. Brown, who founded the
largest and most successful fraternal organisation
that has ever existed among the black people in
America, was a pure black. It would not be

difficult to multiply examples of this kind, but there
is one other name that should not be omitted—
Major R. R. Moten, Commandant at the Hampton
Institute, Hampton, Va., who is one of the few
Negroes in this country who can trace his ancestry,
in an unbroken chain, back to his people in Africa.
The most conspicuous example of a success in literature
is, perhaps, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the poet,
who was a man of unmixed blood.

Let me add that, as my observation and experience
of human life have widened, I have learned
to doubt the wisdom of laying down any general
rules that fix for all times the status of any people,
or determine in advance the progress they are able
or likely to make under conditions different from
those in which they happened, at the present time,
to be found.

I had a lesson in this respect a few years ago at
Tuskegee. It happened that in one of the geography
classes, which at that time were studying Africa, the
students came one day upon a passage in which the
Bushmen were described as the lowest type of
human being to be found in Africa. The writer
went on to describe this people in a way which made
our students feel that the Bushmen were about as
low, degraded and hopeless a type of human nature
as could well be imagined.

While the class was discussing this passage, a boy
in the back of the room raised his hand and indicated

that he had something to say. It turned out that
he had recently come from South Africa and knew
something of the natives, and he did not agree with
the statements in the geography. He went on to
say that his mother was a Bushwoman and that his
father was a Hottentot, a tribe which is generally
supposed to be closely related to the Bushmen. He
had been born in the bush. Afterward, while he
was still a small boy, his father and mother had
moved into town and he had been enabled in this
way to get something of an education. As the
young Bushman happened to stand near the head of
his class and spoke with personal knowledge of both
his father's and mother's people, as well as of the
other tribes of South Africa, what he had to say was
listened to with the greatest interest and attention.
When he followed it up by going to his room and
bringing back photographs with which to illustrate
his statement, both the class and the teachers were
convinced that, however much truth there might be
in the general description given in geographies, the
Bushmen who, for a hundred years or more, had been
hunted like wild beasts by the other stronger tribes
of South Africa, were to a very large extent, the
victims of circumstances.[3]

This incident helped to confirm me in the belief
that in our efforts to help the weaker peoples of the
earth, we should not despair even in the case of the
most humble and backward of the human family.
In mathematics and in physical sciences it is possible
to make exact statements and lay down laws that are
universal and unchanging, but in what concerns
human life and history we cannot be so precise and
definite. Human beings are constantly doing
unprecedented things and it is usually, I suspect, the
unexpected and unprecedented things that men do
that are the most important.

As a boy I had been accustomed to hear Africa
referred to as one hears of Mexico, as if it were a
place where a comparatively homogeneous people
lives, having much the same customs, language, and
civilisation; in short, as if it were a country instead
of a continent. It was some time before I was able
to realise the vast extent and variety of the territory
over which the dark races of Africa are spread.
Africa is larger and considerably more varied in its
geographical structure than North America. The
territory occupied by the dark races of Africa, for
example is more than two times that occupied by the
United States.

I found also that I had only the vaguest notion of
the multitude of different peoples that inhabit Africa
and the variety of civilisations represented among
its inhabitants, not only among the more advanced
races along the Mediterranean but also among the
Negro peoples who still hold possession of nearly
seven-eighths of the continent. For instance, Sir
Harry H. Johnston says of the people inhabiting
the English protectorate of Uganda, where a careful
study has been made of the native peoples:

Speaking of the popular notion of the African
people to which I have referred, Professor Jerome
Dowd, a Southern white man who resides in Charlotte,
N. C., author of a recent sociological study
of the African races, says:

Another statement which one frequently hears,
made indiscriminately of the dark races of Africa,
is that they are constitutionally lazy and cannot be
induced to work. I shall have something to say
about the Negro as a labourer later in this work;
here it is, perhaps, sufficient to recall the fact that
in the greater portion of Africa the black man is still
almost the only labourer. It is he who builds the
railways and the bridges, digs the gold in the South
African mines, and collects the rubber in the Congo
forests. Miss Mary Kingsley, in her volume,
"Travels in West Africa," says of the Kruboys,

"that they are the most important people of West
Africa; for without their help the working of the
Coast would cost more lives than it already does,
and would be in fact practically impossible." In
his book on Tropical Africa, Henry Drummond,
describing the way in which the natives come from
far and near to try the sensation of methodical work
on the building of the Cape to Cairo railway, says:

The fact is, very little comes out of Africa, from an
elephant's tusk to a diamond, that is not the result
of the labour of the African. This does not mean that
the native labourer is always as persistent and
intelligent as he should be, nor that native labour is,

everywhere and for all purposes, of the same value.
Experience has shown that one tribe is more useful
in one form of labour and another tribe in some other
form. What the African has needed most to make
him a better labourer has been the same incentive
to work which the white man had. Where one stick
sharpened forms a spear, two sticks make a fire, and
fifty sticks a place to live, there is little incentive to
systematic and persistent work. This completeness
and modesty of wants is, in my opinion, at the bottom
of the difficulty in Africa. The truth is that the
Negro in Africa or out of it develops in industrial
efficiency, as other human beings do, in response to
his needs and his opportunities.

I had this fact impressed upon me in a very
striking way during a recent visit to Cleveland,
Ohio, when I went to see a little brass foundry
run by a coloured man who is engaged in the
manufacture of those little brass wheels that run
along the trolley wires of our electric railways and,
by means of the trolley pole connect the cars with
the electric current.

The operation of casting these wheels, as I was
informed, requires unusual skill and experience,
because it is necessary to secure just the right degree
of hardness and toughness in the metal, and I was
the more interested in noticing the way in which
this man and his assistants did their work because
I recall that the art of working in iron was one of the

crafts that had been the special property, from time
immemorial, of the people of my race.

Dr. Franz Boas, Professor of Anthropology at
Columbia University, says that, "while much of the
history of early invention is shrouded in darkness,
it seems likely that at the time when the European
was still satisfied with rude stone tools, the African
had invented or adapted the art of smelting ore."

I had been reading a few days before a description
of the rude methods by which, with little more than
a simple bellows and a charcoal fire, native Africans
reduced the ores and forged the implements, many of
them of great beauty as well as usefulness, which one
may still meet with in many parts of Africa.

I am not sufficiently familiar with the detailed
methods of smelting ores and casting metals to be
able to even suggest the vast distance between the
primitive methods of the Native African and the
infinitely more intricate and complicated technique
of the modern industry. The thought, the study
and the invention of thousands, perhaps of millions
of minds, have contributed to create the very conditions
of the modern iron industry. The contrast
between the Native African, working laboriously
in the solitude of the African forests, with his primitive
tools, after a traditional method, and the
American Negro, in his own foundry, with the
advantage of all the machinery, knowledge, and the
skill that modern science and modern invention have

contributed to the improvement of iron industry,
is impressive enough. But this contrast does not
represent the difference in innate qualities in the
men themselves, but rather the difference in the
civilisations that surround them.

It probably requires just as much skill and just
as much patience to make one of those long and
graceful spearheads you may see on the end of an
African lance as it does to make the trolley wheel;
but it takes all our civilisation to make the trolley
wheel possible.

In what I have written thus far in regard to Africa
and African peoples I have sought to emphasise
the vastness of the territories which they inhabit;
the distances which divide them from one another;
the variety of physical types in which they are
represented; the complicated social relations that
sometimes exist among them, and the difficulty of
making general statements, laying down general
laws that hold good at all times and all places for all
of the African peoples.

There is, however, a tie which few white men can
understand, which binds the American Negro to the
African Negro; which unites the black man of
Brazil and the black man of Liberia; which is
constantly drawing into closer relations all the
scattered African peoples whether they are in the old
world or the new.

There is not only the tie of race, which is strong in

any case, but there is the bond of colour, which is
specially important in the case of the black man.
It is this common badge of colour, for instance, which
is responsible for the fact that whatever contributes,
in any degree to the progress of the American Negro,
contributes to the progress of the African Negro,
and to the Negro in South America and the West
Indies. When the African Negro succeeds, it helps
the American Negro. When the African Negro
fails, it hurts the reputation and the standing of the
Negro in every other part of the world.

I have rarely met in America any one of my race
who did not, in one way or another, show a deep
interest in everything connected with Africa. The
millions of Negroes in America are almost as much
interested, for example, in the future of Liberia and
Abyssinia, as they are in their own country. There
is always a peculiar and scarcely definable bond that
binds one black man to another black man, whether
in Africa, Jamaica, Haiti, or the United States.
One evidence of this interest of the Negro in America
in the Negro in Africa is the work that the
American Negro churches are doing in Africa to help
civilise and Christianise their brethren there. There
is scarcely any branch of the Negro church in America
that does not have an organisation through which it
is sending men and women and money into some
portion of Africa. The readiness with which some
of the strongest and brightest men and women in

America, who have had superior opportunities, are
ready to return to Africa and give their lives in an
effort to uplift their fellows, indicates the strong
racial tie that binds the black people of the world
together.

On the other hand, it is true that Negroes in other
parts of the world are beginning to interest themselves
more and more in the fortunes of the Negro
in America. In a very marked degree the one
hundred and thirty millions of black people outside
of America are looking to the ten millions of
Negroes in the United States for guidance and for
inspiration. They are watching closely the progress
of these American Negroes. They are beginning to
realise that if it is possible for the ten million black
men in America, surrounded by modern machinery
and all the other forces of civilisation, to get into line
and march with the procession, that it is also possible
for them, in time, to follow, somewhat more
slowly, perhaps, but in the same direction.