Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/130

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114
THE NEGRO

that constantly attacks her very vitals. Baltimore is another city profoundly affected with the same malady, and Dr. Wm. Lee Howard has well said in an article he has published on the subject, entitled "The Negro as a Distinct Ethnic Factor in Civilization" (Medicine, June, 1903) : " The attitude of complacent moralists, the preaching of far distant ascetics, and the Sunday- school advice of the New England maiden who would take the African to her bosom, would be amusing were it not for the serious conditions underlying the mis- understood facts.

"The truth is that the negro of today, untrammeled and free from control, is rapidly showing atavistic tendencies. He is returning to a state of savagery, and in his frequent attacks of sexual madness, his religious emotionalism, superstition, and indolence, is himself again — a savage. This animalism, this innate character of the African, will demonstrate itself more and more as he is allowed the liberty of his sway of ancestral sexual impulses, and as long as moralists and sociologists of the 'suppressive school' continue to remain purblind to the negro's dominant physiologic and psychologic organism" (p. 423).

And, further on, he very truly says: " It is unscientific to attempt to study the adjustment and laws of society without a thorough knowledge of the structure of its individual parts. It is useless for philanthropists, preachers, and editors in the North, or any other part of the country where the African is not understood or studied, to talk about school and college education controlling his hereditary racial instincts. His individual parts are not known to such people. Only he who knows life from the monad to cell com-