A Defender correspondent taking issue with the above said: “A white woman never has, nor ever will marry a poor Negro. If you must write of it, give it what it deserves by saying: ‘Two fools met. One white and one black.’
“Judge Carpenter was right. The best Negroes are against intermarriage and any one who says they are not tells a falsehood. It is unfair and misleading and gives the world the wrong opinion of the Negro. Only two classes of people believe in intermarriage, namely, people possessing less than one per cent of race pride, and people possessing less than one per cent of intelligence. Why can not we be as proud of what we are as the other group? It is a coward who would like to don the uniform of the enemy and cross to the winning side. If your race is not what you want it, stay and help make it.”4
Another Defender correspondent wrote on miscegenation. “I am for it. I think it is unavoidable and will redound to the benefit of the country and of the world at large. Yet, what chance has a sincere white person to meet a decent colored person? Where are there places, if there are any, where white and colored can meet on purely social basis without getting drunk or indulging in other dissipations? Why don’t you publish the locations of these places where, for instance, the races meet for discussions of a political, artistic and other subjects of universal interest? Keep on publishing those places. See to it that really representative members of your race frequent those places and that the rowdies are kept away from them, and you will see after a while you will get results. Nobody in France draws the color line. Why should they here? It is true we have in this country a vast number of the brutal, stuck-up and conceited Nordics—Dutchmen, Scandinavians, etc. Don’t mind them, their influence on this country’s psychic is not as large as the one your colored race is going to exert.”5
In January 1939 a young white man “madly in love” with a colored girl wrote Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, sociologist, then editor of the Crisis, asking him whether he thought it advisable to marry her. DuBois, in turn, asked his readers what they thought of it and received many replies, among which was the following (from a Negro married to a white woman) : “Although during a lifetime I have favored interracial marriages I feel very kindly disposed toward those who disapprove. Years ago I once wrote a strong letter of protest to a friend who had it in view because he was a man of parts and so near the boundary between the so-called races that my fear was that his genius would be lost to the colored race if he took this step. Whether influenced by my letter I know not, but he did not, and now has three children identified with the colored race through an intraracial match.
“The value of intermarriage is that it tends to increase the bond of fellowship between races, destroys prejudices and often produces clever and beautiful offspring. Consider the Eurasians and other vital stocks produced by the racial mixing. Of the last there are countless illustrations. There comes to mind a family of Greater New York in which the husband and wife, white and black, are very ordinary people by human standards. But their three children are clever and beautiful beyond description. My own marriage, though childless, is happy. My wife is of solid English stock, with a long range of accomplishments and a granite character.”
Another letter read: “Such a marriage union would set an example for the 100 per cent white gentlemen in the Southland who are ever ready to disgrace young colored girls and who by such illicit unions are filling the country over with mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons. These unions as the world knows, take place in sections below the Potomac without the sanction of the church or of the state, in face of the fact that in these sections laws are made to prevent colored and white persons marrying into each others’ families. The white man is instrumental in defeating his own laws; he is opposed to the black man marrying his daughter and yet, he makes possible these illicit unions. A young brown-skin man was walking on the street with his wife, a woman of fair hair and complexion and a decided Anglo-Saxon appearance. He was asked by his employer the next morning on going to work: “Did you marry a white woman?’ ‘No, I married a white man’s daughter,” he answered.”6
Dr. W. E. B. DuBois himself said: “A man named Lawton writing to the Independent says that the N.A.A.C.P. ‘expressly advocates intermarriage’ of whites and blacks. It does nothing of the sort. It simply declares that if white folk will have sexual commerce with blacks, this must take place under the legal restrictions; that prohibition of such legal marriage is a direct bid for bastards and prostitutes and removes all civilized protection from colored girls and women, and finally that if healthy persons wish to marry that that is their business and neither Mr. Lawton’s nor ours. This is a long way from advocating such marriages. In spite of everything we still maintain that English dukes should have the right to marry Americans. But we do not ‘advocate’ it. We have too much respect for Americans.
“If any white person does not want to marry a colored person no one is going to compel him. If he is asked he has simply to say no.”7
Earl Finch, late professor anthropology, Wilberforce University: “Race blending, especially in the rare instances where it occurs under favorable circumstances, produces a type superior in fertility, vitality, and cultural worth to one or both of the parent stocks.”8
Gilbert H. Jones, former president of Wilberforce University: “Race admixture is as undesirable on the part of the best colored people as it is on the part of the best whites …
“… Legislation (on race-mixing) is one-sided and is based on the presumption that Negroes want to mix with whites while whites do not want to mix with Negroes; a thing which is absolutely untrue.
“Futhermore, it gives the Negro woman no method of defense in her fight for right living and the protecting of her womanhood, such as every woman ought to have. It breaks down all the restraint of white men and outrages Negro women, and their offspring born under such conditions have no opportunity in law to take on the name of those responsible for their living. If the white men would leave the Negro women alone there would be no such problem from their angle.
“Human sentiment and artificial barriers may delay the intermarriage and amalgamation of the races, but if the laws of biology, holding sway in the whole gamut of living things, tell man anything, it preaches profoundly the fact that racial amalgamation through intermarriage is the ultimate end the whole gamut of living things, tell man anything, it preaches profoundly of racial contact in the United States.
WHO IS A NEGRO? TURKISH TYPE
XI. His Highness, the Kizlar-Aghassi. (See “The Negro in Turkey,” Sex and Race, Vol. I, Appendix).
“As a biological principle, I am not opposed to race amalgamation for nowhere is there evidence that nature took any precautions to prevent it or prohibit it. Personally I am opposed to it as a matter of race pride.”9
A black Garveyite, in all probability, a West Indian, on the topics: “As to Mulatto Leaders.”
“It blunts the finer sensibilities to think that conspicuous among the so-called leaders are the mulatto element. Think of having these bastards, offspring of commercialized Negro women, to be assuming to represent the race. Men who knew no father and therefore have no name. Dogs because their mothers were, and they have developed all the instincts of the lower animals. Coming into the world without pre-natal affection and dying without knowing whence they came.”10
Kelly Miller, late Dean of Howard University: “The Negro resents the reputation that he is over-eager to marry into the white race. Every time a Negro marries a white person, a white person marries a Negro.”11
Alain Locke, professor of philosophy, Howard University: “It is my opinion that race amalgamation proceeds much more rapidly where races are socially and economically unequal, and that it is this kind of miscegenation that is from both Negro and Caucasian points of view undesirable.
“Considering that