It is the fashion nowadays for every one with a stone in his hand to takea shy at the poor Negro on account of his sins of commission and omission.It is enough that some member of the race is caught flagrante delicto ormerely on suspicion of evil doing to get himself into the public pilloryand the rest of the colored people into our national rogues’ gallery,where they evoke instantly the loud lamentation of white saints andsinners alike, and the statistical and sophistical conclusions of a lot offools and hypocrites. Now do not misunderstand me. I do not deny thatNegroes commit crimes. Not at all, for I know full well that theydo—altogether too many for their own good. But what I object to amongother things is that America, because of the crimes of individual Negroesor because of the suspected crimes of individual Negroes, draws an omnibusindictment against the moral character of the whole race, which ismonstrously unjust and wicked.
Who cares to inquire into the origin of Negro crime, or into the causeswhich have contributed mightily to produce the Negro criminal? The book ofthe Genesis of this man’s crimes awaits to be written by an impartial andsympathetic seeker after truth. The causes which have operated for fiftyyears to produce Negro criminals will some day, I trust, be traced withoutfear or bias to their source. I do not pretend to possess any scientificqualification for such a task, but I do intend in these imperfect remarksto try to indicate in outline merely the dismal stream of these causesduring the last half century, hoping thereby to cast a little light on adark and difficult subject: namely, how out of hostile and unequal social,industrial and political conditions Negro crime emerged and why Negrocriminals abound.
To say that individuals and races are the creatures of circumstances—thatthey are the products of their social heredity and environment—is tostate a commonplace in the accepted doctrines of science to-day. It istherefore perfectly safe to postulate that the greatest circumstance inthe life of the Negro before emancipation was the institution of slavery.For it furnished for two and a half centuries both his social heredity andhis environment, and so shaped his growth and character along moral,religious and industrial lines. Chattel slaves had no rights, the mostrudimentary, which their southern masters were bound to respect. They didnot, for example, possess that most elementary of rights, the ownership ofself and of the products of their labor. They were the legal property ofothers and so were the products of their labor. They did not own the[Pg 4]cabins they slept in or the clothes they wore or the food they ate or thetools they worked with or the air they breathed or the water they drank orthe bit of ground that they were buried in at last, any more than did thecattle of those self same masters. The slave system owned the minds andbodies of its victims, who loved but had no legal title to their mates, orto the offspring who were born to them any more than did the cattle of themasters own their mates or the young which were born to them. The slaveswere rated as so many human machines by the masters for the production ofwealth for themselves and to add to their liberty