Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/147

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THE NEGRO
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in its various forms, especially among colored children, is characteristic of them. This, as they grow older, easily leads to congress between the sexes, with the results above pointed out. As a rule, negro women in this country are not naturally modest, and as the majority of the girls begin to in- dulge in carnal intercourse by the time they arrive at the age of puberty, what little they ever possessed is soon lost. To be sure, through their intense desire to imitate the whites in all matters, many negroes possess a mock modesty, but it is often only skin-deep, and where they exist in large numbers, and few whites reside, they are as devoid of anything of the kind, as are their relatives in the Soudan. As in so many other races, the sensuality of the negro in the United States goes hand in hand with his religious superstitions. The utter sexual abandonment among them is for this reason so commonly seen at their famous camp-meetings ; their oft-repeated railroad excursions given for the benefit of their churches, but more particularly enjoyed, for the reason that they are fraught with unbridled lust from first to last. And, as to their voodoo practices in the South and elsewhere, they simply reek in their history with every unnatural crime in the calendar of bestial sensuality. A voodoo dance at its height would soon convince one that it is not necessary to go to Africa to meet with that species of negro moral degradation that passeth all understanding and of the depth of which there is no measuring. So, too, at many of their so-called literary clubs, where drunkenness, gambling and lewd dancing hold full sway. It has been stated upon good authority that the negroes of this country spend

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