In America the good that is in the Negro is to be controlled and repressed, but beyond the seas from whence he came, there is hope. In the home of his ancestors he will escape that intensity of competition before which he cannot stand, and be placed in an environment where his competitive inferiority will not inhibit initiative.

—- Ernest Sevier Cox

“DURING the centuries of contact, the white man has looked upon the Negro either as a case of hardened degeneracy or he has gone wild in the other extreme of expecting the Negro to assume equal rank with the Caucasian. Both theories are wrong. Possibly equally so. To deny the Negro the right to develop according to natural laws is unjust; to expect him to develop as a Caucasian is a species of sentimental insanity. The one overlooks that he is human, the other ignores that he is a race. He is human and should not be denied the right to work out his own salvation. He is a fully constituted race and like other races, is possessed of ineradicable race instincts and tendencies, and may work out his salvation along race lines only. This understanding of the Negro and the Negro problem will be at the bottom of any rational dealing with the Negro and the problem he constitutes to civilization.

“In the Ideal Negro State the Negro will develop as a Negro, in accord with his race instincts and capacities; but he may need white guidance in the first stages of his independence. Heretofore the white man has made the Negro work for the white man’s advantage. In the ideal Negro State, the white man, if there be need, may direct the Negro’s work for the Negro’s welfare. Heretofore the white man has received chief profit from the Negro’s labor; under a rational system of developing the Negro the latter alone will profit from his toil.

“Transplanted to Africa, the Negro, under the temporary tuition of the United States, will be able to work out his own destiny. Our knowledge of his history shows us that his future is to be as a Negro. When we recognize that the Negro is to develop as a Negro, we are but accrediting to this race specialized human endowments. The Negro, In common with the white man, is human, but the white man is highly specialized in those endowments which express themselves in civilized culture, while on the other hand, the Negro’s specialized endowments do not, in any high degree, express themselves in civilized culture as we define such.

“It may not hinder the progress of the white man if he give the advantage of his superior attainments to the other races, if these latter dwell separate from the former, but the white man is not to make such contribution if by so doing his racial status or his cultural progress is endangered. The presence of numerous colored progress is endangered. The presence of numerous colored peoples within the white groups cannot but qualify, by restriction, white attainments, but the white man may well aid the colored in territories set apart for the colored. Let the white American repatriate the black, leaving the white to continue his progress at home and making politic his advancement of the black abroad.”

— Ernest Sevier Cox, White America, 1937

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