The Quakers
The white Quakers in Massachusetts were treated with great barbarity. It is safe to say that they ranked even lower than the Negroes, because while the Negroes were permitted to enter the colony and, according to an order of May 27, 1652, were trained in the militia—there were no jim-crow companies, then — the Quakers were forbidden to enter the colony at all and came in only by stealth. Any ship captain, who brought in a Quaker from Europe was liable to a fine of twenty pounds sterling, a large sum in those days. On December 3, 1658, one man was fined nine pounds for attending a Quaker meeting, and on September 4, 1656, another was fined five pounds for entertaining one in his house. There was also a heavy fine for selling, or hiring, a horse to a Quaker. In other words, though they were the most civilized and humane of the white colonists—they had met the Indians unarmed and had bought, not stolen, their lands and food—they were virtually outlaws. Those who refused to leave the colony were stripped to the waist, regardless of sex, tied to the tail of a cart and whipped through the town. They were branded on the face and hand with the letters “H” or “R”; their tongues were pierced with red-hot irons; they were banished to slavery in the West Indies; and if they returned after being once expelled from the colony, were hanged. Three men and one woman once suffered this fate together. Needless to say that when there was a fine of forty shillings an hour (about $40 in the value of our time) for having a Quaker in your house that marriage between a white Puritan and a white Quaker, both of whom were usually English, was unthinkable.14
The Jews
The Jews, too, were not welcome in America. In Spanish America, especially Mexico and Peru, they were met with all the horrors of the Inquisition. As late as 1639, they were burnt at the stake.
WHO IS A NEGRO? HOTTENTOT-BUSHMAN TYPES
IV. Left to right: Two Grimaldi carvings of about 15,000 B. C., showing the steatopygy, or development of fat on the buttocks. Venus Kallipygos, or the celebrated Hottentot Venus of the last century, from a model of her in the Museum d’Ethnologie, Paris. (Winchell). A living Hottentot woman of the Kalahari, South Africa. (See also No. 5, Sex and Race, Vol. I.)
None of the North American colonies wanted them. Peter Stuyvesant tried to drive them out of New York. He wanted, he said, none of “the deceitful race—such hateful enemies and blasphemers of Christ … to infect and trouble the new colony.” In 1685, Jewish worship was forbidden in New York, nor could Jews buy land even for a burial-ground. It was not until 1730 they were permitted to own a synagogue.
In 1737, it was only cool heads that prevented a massacre of them in New York. During a contest for a seat in the Assembly between Phillips and Van Horne, the latter made an anti-Semitic speech, in which he depicted in such violent language the sufferings that the Jews were supposed to have inflicted on Christ, that the mob was roused to anti-Semitic frenzy. The Jews saved their lives by staying away from the polls. Later they were disfranchised. A writer of the times said, “The unfortunate Israelites were content to lose their votes could they escape with their lives.”15
In Massachusetts, Maryland, Virginia, and elsewhere there were restrictions against them, too. Virginia classed them with Negroes and Moslems, and forbade them to buy white people. Had there been no Negroes in America, or had the Negroes been in sufficiently small numbers to have been absorbed by the whites as they had been in England, Portugal, and France, the Jews would undoubtedly have occupied the place of persecution now held by the Negroes, and the laws now extant against blacks, would be fixed on them. The American people, if we are to judge by its psychology, needs some group on which to fix its hate—a scapegoat—someone to look down on. The members of the various emigrant groups coming from Europe where they had been looked down upon for centuries found that one of the joys of the New World was that they could now despise someone else. The Irish, for instance, held in contempt for centuries, assumed an air of great superiority over the Negroes. In 1863, they led in the massacre of Negroes in New York City. Indeed they were, to within twenty years ago, the worst enemies of the Negroes in the North, with the Poles, another long oppressed people, the next.
In 1920, the Ku Klux Klan revived for a few years anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism on a nation-wide scale. Both are still strong in certain areas, North and South.
1 Bailey, T. P. (Race Orthodoxy in the South, pp. 350-55. 1914) gives a parallel between the plebians of Rome and the Negroes in the South as based on Coulanges’ The Ancient City.
Martial, Roman writer of the first century A.D. in his eulogy of Caeser (III), tells of the great diversity of races living in Rome, among them being peoples from the Nile and “woolly-haired Ethiopians.”
It is highly probable that the earliest patricians were of a lighter color than the plebians. The former, it seems, were chiefly of European stock, or natives, while the latter were mostly of Eastern “blood.” Prof. Tenney Frank estimates that 90 percent of the plebians were Orientals (Race Mixture in the Roman Empire, Amer. Hist. Rev. Vol. 21, p. 690. 1916). These Orientals were largely from lands conquered by Rome, or lands from which the Roman slave-dealers bought their slaves, that is, they were chiefly Moors, Numidians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, and Sudanese. The island of Delos, off the coast of Greece was the great slave mart of the Roman Empire, and peoples of all colors were bought and sold there.
Great numbers of these Eastern people were brought in to re-populate Rome after the devastations of Hannibal in the third century B.C. After the invasion of Britain, France, Belgium and other northern lands by Julius Caesar, whiter-skinned peoples were also brought in hordes to Rome. These Northern whites seemed to have ranked lowest in the social scale for we find Cicero advising his friend, Atticus not to buy British slaves, because he said they could not be taught.
The patricians undoubtedly had some Oriental strain too, but it might have been more thinned out. Though they claimed descent from the gods some of the most illustrious of them had servile names as Porcia (swine) and Asinia (ass). As regards race” some revealed it in their surnames as Maurus (Moor); Fuscus (dusky) and Niger (Negro). No less than three Roman emperors were named Niger, one of whom married a daughter of a king of England (See Sex and Race, vol. 1, p. 86. 1941).
2 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 3, Ch. 44, p. 174. 1831. 4 vols. Tacitus Book XII, 53.
3 Decline of the West, Vol. 2, p. 69. 1932. Also R. F. A. Hoernle very rightly says, “In ancient Greece and Rome there is no trace of any colour prejudice, whether in sexual or in any other human relations. In the Middle Ages and right into modern times what mattered in dividing men against each other was their religion, but not their race or the color of their skin.” (Race Mixture and Native Policy in South Africa in Schapera, I, Western Civilization and the Natives of South Africa, pp. 263-280. 1934). Had there been color prejudice then it certainly would have been recorded along with the national, tribal, and religious ones.
4 Lappenberg says that the Pope “wishing to set over the Anglo-Saxon bishops a primate devoted to his views, venerable by age and experience and distinguished by his rare knowledge and learning” offered “the dignity to an African, named Hadrian, a monk of Niridano, near Monte Cassino in the kingdom of Naples, who declining the honor for himself, recommended as worthier of it the monk, Theodore, born at Tarsus in Cilicia, a man eminently qualified by his attainments. The recommendation was adopted by the pontiff on condition that Hadrian should accompany the primate to England.” (History of England under the Anglo-Saxons, Vol. 1, p. 172. 1845). To these two men England owed the real beginnings of her culture.
Bede, the Venerable, first English historian, who lived in the time of Theodore and Hadrian, and probably knew them both, says of Hadrian, “uir natione Afir,” that is, he was one of the “African nation.” (Historiae Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, Book 4, ch. 1). At the time “race” was not used as we use it now but “nation” was. A black man was said to be of the African nation. Margaret Murray, a much later English writer, refers to Hadrian twice as “Hadrian the Negro.” She says,