Griggs Lecture 3 (2024) PDF

“[Belton] was joyfully received by the colored people of Cadeville, to whom he related his experiences. They looked at him as though he was a superior being bearing a charmed life, having escaped being killed. It not come to their minds to be surprised at the treatment accorded him for what he had...

“[Belton] was joyfully received by the colored people of Cadeville, to whom he related his experiences. They looked at him as though he was a superior being bearing a charmed life, having escaped being killed. It not come to their minds to be surprised at the treatment accorded him for what he had done. Their wonder was how he got off so easily.” (100) Upon a matter of such tremendous importance to the American people as is the subject herein treated, it is perhaps due our readers to let them know how much of fact disports itself through these pages in the garb of fiction. We beg to say that in no part of the book has the author consciously done violence to conditions as he has been permitted to view them, amid which conditions he has spent his whole life, up to the present hour, as an intensely absorbed observer. If in any of these pages the reader comes across that which puts him in a mood to chide, may the author not hope that the wrath aroused be not wasted upon the inconsequential painter, but directed toward the landscape that forced the brush into his hand, stretched the canvas, and shouted in irresistible tones: “Write!” -- Griggs, Preface “Solemnly Attested,” to The Hindered Hand BIOLOGICAL RACISM & THE TERRORS OF “miscegenation” miscegenation (n.), coined in 1863 from miscere “to mix” + genus “race” “Belton bent forward to look at his infant son. A terrible shriek broke from his lips. He dropped the lamp upon the floor and fled out of the house and rushed madly through the city. The color of Antoinette was brown. The color of Belton was dark. But the child was white!” (94) “Just two years prior to my meeting you, a book entitled ‘White Supremacy and Negro Subordination,’ by the merest accident came into my possession. That book made a revelation to me of a most startling nature.” (118)  PREFACE. “This work, the result of many years of patient study and investigation of the normal order of American society … shows just what the census returns show, that negroes having multiplied from a half to four millions in less than a century, were of necessity in their normal condition in the South … that in “freedom” they died out, and therefore, of necessity, were in an abnormal condition in the North. Furthermore, it shows that amalgamation, as with varieties of our own race that come to us from the Old World, is impossible; and therefore, human governments cannot exist an hour anywhere where these widely different races are forced into legal equality in approximate proportions. Finally, it shows that even when both white and negro become so debauched, degraded, and sinful as to equalize and harmonize together, as we see with Portuguese and Spaniards on this Continent, and sometimes with individuals among ourselves, who mate and mix their blood, their progeny become sterile, diseased, rotten, and within a certain time, utterly perish from the earth. Nevertheless, the Northern States combined together in 1860 … to force the Southern States to practice their theories or ‘ideas’ on this subject, or, in other words, to doom the Southern people to a fate more horrible than death itself! They now rule the South by military force, and by the same force have torn four millions of negroes from their normal condition, and are striving to ‘reconstruct’ American society on a Mongrel basis… [E]very man, and woman too, in this broad land must accept the simple but stupendous truth of white supremacy and negro subordination, or consent to have it forced on them by years of social anarchy, horror, and misery!” (v-vii)  VIOLA’S INTERPRETATION TO THE READER “That book proved to me that the intermingling of the races in the sexual relationship was sapping the vitality of the Negro This work, if carefully and generally read, will race and, in fact, was slowly but surely exterminating the race. dispel that terrible delusion which plunged us into It demonstrated that the fourth generation of the children born Civil War … It presents in language that can be of intermarrying mulattoes were invariably sterile or woefully easily understood … the true relation of the races lacking in vital force. … to each other, proving even beyond question or cavil, that when the two races are in juxta-position, This is a startling revelation. While this intermingling was the negro should hold an inferior or subordinate impairing the vital force of our race and exterminating it, it position to the white race, and that in such position was having no such effect on the white race for the following only can the negro race be prosperous and happy. reason. Every half-breed, or for that, every person having a It will show that the normal condition of the tinge of Negro blood, the white people cast off. We receive negro when in contact with the white man, is to be the cast off with open arms and he comes to us with his guided and controlled socially and politically by devitalizing power. Thus the white man was slowly the white race. exterminating us and our total extinction was but a short period of time distant. I looked out upon our strong, tender hearted, manly race being swept from the face of the earth by immorality, and the very marrow in my bones seemed chilled at the thought thereof. I determined to spend my life fighting the evil. My first step was to solemnly pledge God to never marry a mulatto man.” (118)