[Footnote 1:  For a general treatment of the matter of the Negro as dealt with in American Literature, especially fiction, note “The Negro in American Fiction,” in the Dial, May 11, 1916, a paper included in The Negro in Literature and Art.  The thesis there is that imaginative treatment of the Negro is still governed by outworn antebellum types, or that in the search for burlesque some types of young and uncultured Negroes of the present day are deliberately overdrawn, but that there is not an honest or a serious facing of the characters and the situations in the life of the Negro people in the United States to-day.  Since the paper first appeared it has received much further point; witness the stories by E.K.  Means and Octavius Roy Cohen.]

Still another line of attack was now to attempt to deprive the Negro of any credit for initiative or for any independent achievement whatsoever.  In May, 1903, Alfred H. Stone contributed to the Atlantic a paper, “The Mulatto in the Negro Problem,” which contended at the same time that whatever meritorious work the race had accomplished was due to the infusion of white blood and that it was the mulatto that was constantly poisoning the mind of the Negro with “radical teachings and destructive doctrines.”  These points found frequent iteration throughout the period, and years afterwards, in 1917, the first found formal statement in the American Journal of Sociology in an article by Edward Byron Reuter, “The Superiority of the Mulatto,” which the next year was elaborated into a volume, The Mulatto in the United States.  To argue the superiority of the mulatto of course is simply to argue once more the inferiority of the Negro to the white man.

All of this dispraise together presented a formidable case and one from which the race suffered immeasurably; nor was it entirely offset in the same years by the appearance even of DuBois’s remarkable book, The Souls of Black Folk, or by the several uplift publications of Booker T. Washington.  In passing we wish to refer to three points:  (1) The effect of education on the Negro; (2) the matter of the Negro criminal (and of mortality), and (3) the quality and function of the mulatto.

Education could certainly not be blamed for the difficulties of the problem in the new day until it had been properly tried.  In no one of the Southern states within the period did the Negro child receive a fair chance.  He was frequently subjected to inferior teaching, dilapidated accommodations, and short terms.  In the representative city of Atlanta in 1903 the white school population numbered 14,465 and the colored 8,118.  The Negroes, however, while numbering 35 per cent of the whole, received but 12 per cent of the school funds.  The average white teacher received $745 a year, and the Negro teacher $450.  In the great reduction of the percentage of illiteracy in the race from 70 in 1880 to 30.4 in 1910 the missionary colleges—­those