Mixed Race Studies

These half-breed negroes in the United States, or, in fact, all that class of people having any negro blood in them at all, are extremely objectionable factors to add to our nation or risk in the building up of our civilization. They often, indeed in a large proportion of instances, are worse than the typical negroes themselves, and certainly a large number of them are no better. They are dangerous from whatever point man may elect to view them, as they may possess all of the vicious and sensual traits of the negro, without the color of the latter’s skin as a warning flag to the unwary. In any question at issue they will invariably choose sides with the colored race every time, and from their keener wits and higher intelligence are capable of giving a greater amount of trouble. Mulattoes, too, have better opportunities to contract white alliances in marriage, and thus insidiously pass the savage Ethiopian blood into the veins of the Anglo-Saxon or American. This is most deplorable, for, as I have frequently remarked, the negro has absolutely nothing in his organization that can be added to our own with the slightest value, while on the other hand, nearly everything about him, mentally, morally and physically, is undesirable in the highest degree. As has been shown, he is, as a rule, deeply imbued with criminal tendencies, and his hybrids are equally so. Mulattoes have no higher sense of our civilization than the black stock from which they are derived. They are, however, in speech, manners, dress and actions better mimics of the whites than most of the true negroes. Personally, I have found them equally superstitious, treacherous, mendacious, and unreliable. It is the better class of hybrids, however, that command such place and position in this country that demand more than usual ability to fill. Many regard them as the colored doctors, the colored lawyers, colored clergymen, colored poets and authors, and so on, whereas, as a matter of fact, they are nothing of the kind. They are hybrids, nothing more nor less, and often with a very minute tincture of the African negro in them. Some of them are so like Caucasians in face and figure, that were they to go abroad, to Europe, for example, the average European would never for an instant suspect the negro blood in them, and it would only be that person well versed in the negro character and with a knowledge gained by long contact with the race, that could make the correct ethnical diagnosis. I refer distinctly to such specimens as Henry Ossawa Tanner (artist), Daniel H. Williams (surgeon), Charles Waddell Chesnutt (novelist), Francis James Grimké (clergyman), and likewise (W. E. Burghardt) Du Bois (sociologist). When the type is more pronounced, there is no mistaking them, as the negro then crops out with greater certainty. This is the case with such examples as Paul Lawrence Dunbar (poet), Kelly Miller (mathematician), Granville T. Woods (electrician), Edward H. Morris (lawyer), Booker T. Washington (teacher), and several others. Negroes claim one and all of these as representatives of their race in America, and a man like Du Bois is continually howling about them one and all in the press as the Advance Guard of the Negro Race in America.

R. W. Shufeldt, The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization, (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1907), 91-93.