Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/132

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THE NEGRO

in this country be the distinct gainer, I, for one, do not for a moment doubt. But let us for a while pass still further south in this region, south of Washington and Baltimore, into our subtropical realm, into the so-called " black belt " region, and see how our Caucasian brethren are faring in that quarter. The dangers, all of them, that I have attempted to portray in the leading paragraphs of this chapter are there vastly intensified and increased. The bulk of the white population throughout those states are slowly awakening to the horrors of the situation that now confronts them. Negroes are massed everywhere, and being no longer under control, menace all that is decent in a developing nation — menace morals; menace progress and development; menace legal and political stability; and threaten, in no uncertain manner, the very existence and purity of the American race and its career. Ask any intelligent Southern man or woman and he or she will tell you something of the state of affairs there existing, even if such people do not grasp the danger in its fulness as the far-seeing and philosophic biologist and anthropologist does. Listen to some of the paragraphs that Ellen Barret Ligon, M. D., of Mobile, Alabama, has printed in her recent article on "The White Woman and the Negro," which appeared in the November, 1903, issue of a Springfield, Massachusetts, magazine, called Good Housekeeping. After pointing out the nature of our American civilization in the South and our duties in preserving it; after touching upon the dire calamities which follow an attempt to inaugurate social equality between the negroes and the whites; after indicating the true attitude of the Southerner