Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 28

11. P[aul] B[randon] Barringer, The American Negro: His Past and Future, 3rd ed. (Raleigh, NC: Edwards & Broughton, 1900). (23 p.)

Prediction that African Americans are reverting to savagism without the physical restraints and cultural guidance provided by slavery. “But we all know that we had a good negro in this country once, and that was in slave times. This was a the salient feature of slavery—an inferior race about as moral as the higher.” The author, a physician from North Carolina who belonged to the faculty of the medical school at the University of Virginia when he wrote this piece, opined that the degeneration of the black race could be reversed if African Americans were removed from politics (i.e., disfranchised) and provided with a level of education more suited to their limited mental capabilities. He ends his essay with this paragraph. “In conclusion: I have endeavored to show that everything points to the fact that the phylogeny of the negro is carrying him back to barbarism, to show that the temporary elevation produced by the discipline of slavery is not being maintained by the efforts we have made at common school education, in the hands of his own race, and that we must at once, if we would save the negro and the South, try something else. I would finally urge that we try henceforth an education of trade or industrial type, given at the hands of well-chosen white teachers, who will teach him to respect, to obey and to work. Under this, if experience be not fallacious—he will improve I n morality, in character, and in capacity as a taxpayer. Then and not till then, will the franchise become for him a reality and the ‘Jim Crow car” a memory.”