Charles Barkley and the Plague of ‘Unintelligent’ Blacks

And the looking away is quite old. In his book Lynching: American Mob Murder in Global Perspective, historian Robert Thurston traces the roots of respectability politics to the postbellum era. Asked to assess the problem of lynching, black public figures condemned barbarism—but not just the barbarism of white mobs.

“The criminal record of the Negro people is alarming in its proportions,” wrote the great black educator Kelly Miller in 1899. “The whole race is given an evil reputation by reason of its criminal class.” Miller was not pro-lynching. But he believed that black criminality was part of the cause and argued that black protest would be fully justified until the rate of black criminality was zero:

It is not sufficient to say that ninety-five out of every hundred Negroes are orderly and well behaved. The ninety-five must band themselves together to restrain or suppress the vicious five.

Miller was not an outlier. “The percentage of Negro criminals is unusually large,” asserted Francis J. Grimké. Mary Church Terrell assailed “negroes who are known to have been guilty of assault” claiming that they were “ignorant, repulsive in appearance and as near the brute creation as it is possible for a human being to be.” Terrell asserted that the “best negroes” have no sympathy for such “brutes.” In 1918, Tuskegee graduate and educator William J. Edwards claimed in his memoir that “there are criminals in the Negro race for whom no legal form of punishment is too severe.” He went further arguing that the Negro was on a lower order of civilization and often “uneducated, undisciplined, untrained, he is often ferocious or dangerous; he makes a criminal of the lowest type for he is the product of ignorance.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *