RACES: Browns

That the dark tenth of the U. S. population should no longer be called Negroes, but Browns, is the thesis of a study published last week by President Edwin Rogers Embree of the Julius Rosenwald Fund.* From 1619 when John Smith bought “twenty Negars” and thus introduced slavery to Anglo-Saxon America, until 1808 when the U. S. formally forbade slave importations, the Negroes came from diverse African stocks. From the beginning, the African races in America married among themselves and with Indians, and practically from the beginning acquired white blood. Comments Mr. Embree: “No special odium was attached to the begetting of mulatto children in slave days. It was regarded almost as a matter of course. Thomas Jefferson was reported, when President, to have regretted that certain of his own children were estopped from voting because of the conditions imposed by their maternity. When a yellow girl, reputed to be the daughter of President Tyler and living in his entourage in the White House, eloped with a white man and in punishment was sold ‘down the river,’ the matter was so ordinary as to cause only a piquant wave of gossip in Washington society. What was customary, in this regard, of those in high places was true to a greater degree of the generality of slave owners.” Result is a melange of black and white, dashed with red. The U. S. Census counts 20% of Negroes as mulattoes. Private sociological estimates put the mulatto per centage at 80%. Mr. Embree believes that “well above half of the Negroes in America have some white or Indian blood.” For a half century Negroes and mulattoes have been marrying mainly among their own color “and so distributing the primary blood mixtures more and more evenly throughout the new race.” Hence, “even if there is no more infusion of white blood, a few more generations of mingling among the Negroes themselves will bring about so general a distribution of inheritance strains that it is likely that every Negro in America will have some white blood and most of them some Indian ancestry.” Already they show traits “as uniform as any typical race of mixed ancestry, such for instance as the Japanese or the Anglo-Saxons.”

Mr. Embree’s Browns are still mostly peasants and servants on Southern farms or laborers in Northern factories. But sufficient have risen into the arts, professions and commerce for him to predict their pervasion of the U. S. scene and despite much turmoil, which he considers not altogether valueless for U. S. culture, their passive acceptance by the general population.

Helping to speed the Browns on their ascent are the Rockefeller, Rosenwald, Carnegie, Peabody, Slater, Jeanes, Phelps-Stokes, du Pont and Duke philanthropic foundations. Each foundation develops some function of the Browns’ wellbeing. The Julius Rosenwald Foundation, for example, in co-operation with States and counties has established 5,000 primary schools for colored children, at least one in almost every county of 14 Southern States. Negroes gratefully call Mr. Rosenwald, whose mail order catalogs they used before they could use his textbooks, “Cap’n Julius.”

* BROWN AMERICA—Edwin R. Embree— Viking ($2.50).