But although he met with no color restrictions in France, he finally left that country in disgust and went to Spain. For aught I know he returned to America.
The reason? He was so typically American in his ways even to his large owl-like spectacles, that the Parisians, accustomed though they are to seeing Sengalese and other black people, could not help but stare at a black man who was so very much like a white American in his ways. Having associated all his life with white American businessmen and others of the upper class, he had become a a black edition of them.
Finally, there is only one race—the human race. Most men will live like brothers when some particular exploiting interest does not teach them to hate one another. White and black, as I have shown in this book never really had a chance to be friends from the start. The Virginia slaveholders taught them to hate one another—a hate that was crystallized into law, all for the benefit of the masters, who waxed fat for a while but finally lost all. Crime, we are told, does not pay. Well, neither does it pay when made into law by a powerful exploiting group.
The doctrine of racial superiority as it now exists in Germany and the United States is the insanity of the many for the gain of a few.
Now is the time while this most distressing war is on to wipe off the books those laws that make one group of American citizens the enemies of another group. Jim-crow laws have brought only evil in the past; they can bring only evil for the future. Let us start with a clean slate and give future generations a chance.
Chapter One
RACE AND THE NEW WORLD
THE Old World, as was shown in Volume One, is a vast and intricate patchwork of “races” which came about as the result of the mating of Negro and Caucasian acting together with climate for probably hundreds of thousands of years. But great as this miscegenation was it is excelled by the New World, where we had the entrance of a third element entirely new to civilized man: The Indian.
To the New World came almost every variety of mankind from Europe, Asia, Africa and the South Seas. These, uniting with the Indian, or other varieties that had sprung up in the New World, produced hundreds of other sub-varieties hitherto unknown—varieties which are to be found today from Alaska to the tip of Argentina, and whose “blood” like the air we breathe has been penetrating even into the most undreamed of places until when we say “American” we say nearly always “mixed blood.”
To find anything approaching a “pure” race in the New World now one must go among the most primitive Indians in the wilds of Peru, Bolivia, and the Amazon. That the peoples of the two Americas are hybrid is a great undeniable fact. If we use the phraseology of the superior Nordic we can call them “mongrel.”
This mixing of “races” is true of Anglo-Saxon America and Latin America alike but particularly so of Latin America. What Simón Bolívar, liberator of five South American countries, and one of the most colossal figures of history, said of Venezuela is true of all that region south of the Rio Grande. He said, “We must face the fact that our race is not European; it is rather a composite of Africa and America than an emanation of Europe for Spain, itself, ceased to be European by its African blood; its institutions and character. It is impossible to determine exactly to what human family we belong. Most of the Indians were annihilated; the European has been mixed with the Indian and the African. We were all born of the bosom of the same mother but our fathers differing in origin and blood are foreigners and we all differ visibly in color of skin.”1
“Spain, itself, ceased to be European by its African blood.” Significant words! Words to be remembered whenever we think of the earliest settlers of the New World. Bolivar, in addition to his wide knowledge of Spanish history, had lived in Spain; had seen the racial composition of its people, and was the descendant himself, of a noble Spanish family. We shall presently quote other writers of Bolivar’s time to the same effect. In other words, the discoverers and the earliest trail-blazers of the New World were already mixed—a people which were largely mulatto, if you will—on their arrival in 1492.
Of course, the people in the northern part of the Peninsula, were “unmixed” white, being largely of Teutonic stock, but in the southern portion they had been mixed Caucasian and Negro from time immemorial.2 In fact, this region was only geographically European. Several writers have said that Europe began only at the Pyrenees.
This mixed strain was particularly evident in the Portuguese, who, next to the Spaniards, were the pioneers in the New World. Indeed, it is the Portuguese, who with the Moors, Venetians, Genoese and other “mongrels” of the Mediterranean, were the pioneers in the world travel and exploration that led up to Columbus. It was the Portuguese discovery of the Cape of Good Hope in 1487 that inspired Columbus to seek a western route to India, and which, in turn, brought about the discovery of America. The Nordics, with the exception of occasional travelers, like Sir John Mandeville, did not come on the scene until nearly a century later under Elizabeth of England.
So mixed were the Portuguese that in 1492 there was already a Negro strain in its royal family. The same was true in less degree of the Spanish royal family. As for Italy, it had not only once been overrun by the Moors, but Negro slaves in great numbers had been brought in, principally between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries by the Venetians.3 The Pisanos and Genoese also imported a considerable number from Nubia, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Morocco, and sold them to the noble families, who used them as servants, grooms, and favorites, and even amalgamated with them. So little was the prejudice against color in Europe that in the sixteenth century the son of a Negro female slave, or servant, rose to be head of the most distinguished royal family of the time.4
This may be considered extraordinary now but it was not so then. The southern Europeans had been accustomed for centuries to having dark-skinned men among their rulers, in fact, whole series of them. As Roy Nash says, “Many North Americans profess horror at the marriage of white and colored types, which is so common in South America. Mark well, then, that the first contact of the Portuguese and Spaniards with a dark-skinned people was the contact of the conquered with the brown-skinned conquerors. And the darker man was the more cultured, the more learned, the more artistic. He lived in the castles and towns. He was the rich man and the Portuguese became serfs upon his land. Under such conditions it would be deemed an honor for the white to mate or marry with the governing class, the brown man, instead of the reverse. Nor was it only the Portuguese peasantry whose blood mingled with the Moors. Alphonso VI, who united Castille and Leon and Galicia in 1073, to cite but one of many instances of marriages between Christian and Arab nobles, chose a Moorish princess, the daughter of the Emir of Seville, to be the mother of his son, Sancho.”5
Centuries after Columbus, there continued to be much Negro strain in the Latin peoples. G. W. Bridges, writing in Bolivar’s time, says, “There can be no doubt that the Portuguese, Spaniards, and Neapolitans are highly tinged with Negro blood.”6 In 1856, a white American visitor to Puerto Rico testifies similarly to the Negro strain in the Spanish emigrants to that island. He says, “Spaniards, generally indulge in the belief, or at least feign to do so, that Creoles are mulattoes and allege with wonderful assurance that by the mere fact of being born in Spain, every Penninsular (Spaniard) is a white. In many cases, however, the evidence of the senses is opposed to this assertion, as the complexion of the greatest part of them is nearer that of the Negroes than of white people. And there are, besides, well-grounded reasons for believing that much African blood flows in their veins, though there are many families that are evidently white, as is also the case in Cuba. One of the armies that invaded Spain in the eighth century was formed of four thousand Negroes from Ethiopia who were never known to have left the country. What must now be the number of the descendants of these Negroes after the lapse of eleven centuries. In fact by their features, by the quality of their hair, the origin of many Spaniards can be confidently traced to the African race. Nevertheless in some provinces of the Peninsula (that is, Spain), they style themselves not only pure whites, but noblemen, also.”7
This writer barely approaches the number of Negroes that were brought into the Iberian