Chapter Five
MIXED MARRIAGES AS SEEN BY THE CLERGY AND THE LAITY
“A weak mind is like a microscope which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.” Lord Chesterfield.
WENDELL PHILIPS: “Amalgamation! Remember this, the youngest of you: that on the 4th day of July, 1863, you heard a man say that in all the light of history, in virtue of every page he has read that he was an amalgamationist to the utmost extent. (Applause.) I have no hope for the future as this country has no past and Europe has no past, but in that sublime mingling of races which is God’s own method of civilizing and elevating the world. (Loud Applause.)”1
The World (New York) registered its disapproval of Eugene O’Neill’s play, “All God’s Chillun Got Wings,” in which a Negro marries a white woman, and urged the Board of Aldermen to stop it, holding that:
“An act which is illegal in more than half the nation and is disapproved in the entire country is to be represented in a manner indicating approval in a public theatre.”2
Ruth S. Keen (letter of rebuttal to Arthur Brisbane) : “Many white men are bullies and braggarts, but there is one group over which they have no control—their white women.
“From the beginning of time, at first stealthily and subtly but now quite openly and shamelessly, white women have always had what they wanted (you see, we share our lord’s rapaciousness) and they have always given themselves to men whom they admired and preferred quite regardless of class, creed, race, color or previous condition of servitude.
“So—Mr. Brisbane, I have the honor to inform you that, if white girls admire and prefer men of other races, neither bluster, bragging nor bombs will stop them from doing so for they not only trust their own convictions in such matters but have the courage to carry them out.”3
Letter of an educated white woman to a Negro writer. “… When the better class of white women get freed from this color psychosis you (black men) are going to be the kings of the earth. We will try to make up to you for some of the things you haven’t had. I take a great delight in performing the most menial tasks for all my dark men friends. It sort of evens things up … and I am quite open and shameless. Being in the fatal forties my gestures are not misunderstood and I have a warm maternal feeling for the boys and girls which they respond to easily as they know it to be sincere.”4
Albert Stowe Leecraft of Houston, Texas, on the mulatto: “In animal life crossing of breeds produces what is called “a Mule …”
“A Mule-Nigger is the aftermath or fruitage of the clandestine visits of a low-down, depraved, degenerate white scallawag who by day lives in the midst of social refinement in the white communities of this Christian world and frequents the colored settlements under the cover of darkness of the night and plants his seed of iniquity secretly, with only the eyes of the recording angel watching his footsteps, and those human skunks well know the inevitable birth of their progenies brings disgrace to decent humanity.
“A child brought into life through such a union of mixed bloods of ‘strange flesh’ is neither a white child or a Nigger; he is not white and he is not black, and the offspring of social error does not inherit the spiritual blessing of God or the fellowship of man … He is a social outcast of society, a living monument in the walks of life, visualizing the abortion of the plans of God Almighty and picturing the perfidy of immoral humanity …
“The laws of nature do not permit the cross-breeding of foreign seeds of life … A coating of tar will not make an ink-spot white, and a million years of evolution will never bring forth a clean, pure, spotless-skin white child after the ancestral blood has been polluted with blood of Negroid taint …
“The big, burly, flat-footed, thick-lipped, spread-nose, black-skin, kinky-haired ‘Nigger’ of this age are all of the blood of Cain, the man God made black.”5
Father Gillis, Catholic priest of New York: “There are those who maintain that as much as one-third of the whole population of the United States has some strain of colored blood. Be that statement accurate or exaggerated the unquestionable fact remains that however much man, both white man and black man, may revolt from miscegenation, Nature does not abhor the union of the races. If Nature does not, God does not for the laws of Nature are the laws of God. And the Church takes her cue from the laws of God rather than from the feelings and prejudices of man. The Church will baptize a mulatto, ordain him a priest, or consecrate him bishop. She has done so here in the United States. She does not consider the offspring of a Negro and a white a monster.
“Enough! man is man, be he black or white.”6
Dr. J. H. Oldham, English writer: “Those who hold with Dr. Stoddard that ‘it is clean, virile, genius-bearing blood streaming down through the unerring action of heredity’ that is going to ‘solve our problem and sweep us on to higher and nobler destinies’ ought, if they are consistent, to welcome such blood wherever they find it. But if they refuse to do this and instead of keeping to the question of strains, which exhibit the highest mental and moral qualities begin to talk of ‘race which includes bad as well as good strains, the bottom falls out of their argument. The argument from heredity, whatever may be its force, is concerned with particular strains or lines of descent and warrants no conclusion in regard to races as a whole.’ ”7
Putnam Weale, English writer: “Where the white man has not absolutely cleared the ground of his colored rival he may be bred down to a position of inferiority … The whites of the Southern States when they do everything they can to prevent all mixing of blood are simply obeying natural laws, which if they had ignored, would quickly lead, to their own undoing. In the Southern States miscegenation is rightly held to be an offense far worse than manslaughter … The position of the whites would speedily become intolerable from an interbreeding which would perforce drag down all to the mixed white level of certain parts of South America, notably Brazil—where the black man has bred not only with white but with Indians thus producing dreadful hybrids … the black man is something apart … something untouchable.”8
Lord Olivier, Colonial Administrator, and former Secretary of State for India, says of the union of the black man and the white woman: “There is no correspondingly strong instinctive aversion nor is there so strong an ostensible objection to a white man’s marrying a woman of mixed descent. The latter kind of union is much more likely to occur than the former. There is good biological reason for the distinction. Whatever the potentialities of the African stock as a vehicle for human manifestations, and, I, myself, believe them to be like those of the Russian people, exceedingly important and valuable—a matrix of emotional and spiritual energies that have yet to find their human expression in suitably adapted forms—the white races are now, in fact, by far, the further advanced in intellectual human development and it would be expedient on this account alone that their maternity should be economised to the utmost. A woman may be the mother of a limited number of children, and our notion of the number advisable is contracting, and it is bad natural economy to breed backward from her.”9
Mason Dixon, white Southerner, denouncing the verdict in the Rhinelander case said the marriage “should have been annulled as soon as it was established that there was colored blood in her veins. Down South we know how to handle such affairs. If the couple feel that they must live together that is their affair. But no civilized state should sanction marriage between white and black. New York and other states have no law against mixed marriages. Until they adopt such laws these states will be a disgrace to the nation.’”10
Rev. W. A. Cotton, missionary in South Africa: “During four hundred years Europeans as a race … have continuously, and confessedly do still lack, the gift of continence in their relations with colored peoples whom they have brought under their sway.
“Consequently the prohibition of marriage is very gravely to be reprobated …
“I must confess a very special drawing to me of delighted