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Robert
E. Kuttner, PH.D. Following is a succinct but comprehensive account of Negro history. It deals, first, with the African ancestors of the American Negro, usually called Bantu. Since time began, African blacks have made little progress: There is no record of their ever having created a technical civilization; they devised no written languages (only spoken dialects); and until the coming of the white man, so elementary a thing as a wheel was unknown to them. Until then, they had no system of measurement; their agriculture was primitive; they domesticated no animals; they built no bridges or terraces; and their system of cartage was - as it remains - the human head. In their place of origin, south of the Sahara, their life was primitive in the extreme. In the United States, and in like manner, the descendants of the Bantu, the black Afro-Americans, have accomplished little. What achievements they can rightly claim, in the main, must be credited to hybrids, Negroes with considerable white ancestry. Of necessity, then, the serious historian finds he cannot, in writing of this race, list significant Negro cultural, scientific, or social advancements. There aren't any. Instead, he must confine himself to puncturing the myths and fiction that have filled the void of the Negro's essentially negative record.
That is the Negro's history. The author of this treatise, Dr. Robert E. Kuttner, is well equipped to write this book. He holds a doctor's degree in zoology and has published in this area. His original interest, that of genetics, led to work in racial differences. This work, in turn, resulted in a paper (sponsored by Nobel Laureate William Shockley) on the relative position of the American Indian. Dr. Kuttner gave this paper before the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Kuttner edited the important volume, Race and Modern Science, Social Science Press, 1967, New York City. This issue of The Citizen is commended to readers whose knowledge of race differences has been confused by name calling and self-serving emotionalism. Until American policy toward the Negro is based on fact (not myth and fiction) there will be no lasting solution of the race problem. It is to he hoped that this work - being fact and not fiction - will contribute to that end.
A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF NEGRO HISTORY Introduction Even the most casual reader of newspapers, magazines, and books must be dismayed by the ever-growing flood of material on Negro history. It almost seems as if some long-buried tomb had been opened to reveal for the first time the glittering epic of a great race that enriched all mankind by its genius and enterprise. But the source of this flood has no basis in fresh archeological discoveries. No precious scrolls have been found; no crumbling library excavated; no pyramid forced to yield its secrets. All that is new is the desire to rewrite Negro history, with a wanton disregard for truth. The Negro American is reaching for a larger share of economic and political power. Appreciating that Black Power must rest on Black Pride, an "instant" history has been concocted to build Negro self-esteem. With the eager help of numerous politicians, journalists, and academicians, and with more than adequate subsidies from private donors and foundations, a fictional history has been created out of a factual vacuum. The Negro masses have been told they have a record equal or superior to the white man's in the shaping of destiny. They have been led to expect equal or superior roles in tile shaping of our common future. The educated public is familiar with falsified history. A short decade ago Bolshevik propagandists announced that Russian socialist science pioneered the technological miracles of the Twentieth Century. Only a generation ago Nazi philosophers promoted the idea that blond Aryans laid the foundation stones of Greek and Roman classical civilization. These euphoric myths may have inspired duped individuals to entertain feelings of racial or ideological superiority, but the scholarly world stood aloof from this abuse of history. Historians rejected these artificial ethnic heritages. Truth was not to be perverted to glorify political dogmas. But now a strange and awkward silence greets Negro historical revisionism. Few cries of protest are directed at this polluted Black racist propaganda. There are far more reasons for rebuking Black Historians than the old German Nordicists or the Stalinist Slavophiles. At least these older doctrines contained a kernel of truth. The world does owe much to blond Homeric heroes, and the legacy of the Slavic people is not deficient in science, music, and literature. The charge against these older racisms is exaggeration, a careless and one-sided inflation of facts. But Black History brings a totally different affront before the bar of public opinion. It is not a case of inflation but of outright invention. Black History lacks a nucleus of significant fact; there is nothing to inflate. All its great moments are synthetic events, either completely unreal or manufactured out of trivial exploits and ethnic gossip. A fairy tale emperor once paraded before his people in cellophane robes. No one laughed because he told them only honest souls could see his clothes. Then the voice of a child opened the eyes of the people. The same rude exposure awaits Negro History...
The Civil War The Negro remained a passive object until the Civil War. Before this conflict, a few plantation mutinies and Abolitionist petitions constituted the entire range of Negro participation in the flow of history. The raging slavery question moved the Negro into the focus of American history as dead leaves are carried by a whirlwind, and one morning the plantation grapevine brought news that Black folk were free. This momentous change was ushered in without consulting the slaves, without preparing them, and sometimes without even physically liberating them. The Negro became free because it suited the purposes of the strongest faction of white men to set them free. The Negro is understandably disappointed that the most important day in Afro-American history came to pass as a result of exclusively white decisions. To salve a terrible feeling of impotence, claims have been advanced that Negro troops were the decisive factor in winning the Civil War. Texts for school children emphasize the Negro contribution (e.g. 22), but serious historians are content to assign the final Union triumph to a larger population, a stronger economy, a successful blockade, and to a careless Confederate mobilization. Close to 200,000 Blacks were estimated to have served in the armed forces of the Union. This number could be reached only by drawing on slaves in border states and exslaves in liberated areas. The first Negro units were not organized until 1863, and not tested in serious fighting until July of that year, when the war reached its mid-point. Serving under white officers, many Black regiments displayed adequate valor and received adequate recognition. The same few accounts of Negro courage appear in the various popular books on the subject, and the contents need not be reviewed here, but nowhere is it shown that the Negro soldier was crucial for final victory. (2, ch. 7; 17, ch. 5). Nor are there attempts to revive other eyewitness accounts of officers from abolitionist Massachusetts regiments shooting Negro troops to halt stampedes to the rear (23). Also neglected in these tediously rehearsed chapters is the strange distribution of Medal of Honor winners, half of all those being awarded to Negroes resulting from a single action by a single division on a single day a few months before the war ended. If Negro courage was decisive, and Negro performance uniformly good in all units and engagements, 12 out of a total of 20 medals would not have gone to Negro troops for one charge ordered by a Negrophile general, Ben Butler. Strong resentment was shown against Black regiments when pay scales were equalized. Since many Negro recruits were in labor detachments or posted to safe garrisons, this seemed to reward the great mass of ill-trained Black soldiers the same as frontline whites. This was expressed in Congress in mid-1864 (24).
The Reconstruction Era Frederick Douglass was the solitary Negro who had any influence on public thinking in America from before the Civil War through the Reconstruction period. A lightskinned ex-slave, he embarked on an Abolitionist career with the help of sympathetic white liberals, including admiring English society ladies then gripped with an enthusiasm for Anti-Slavery Leagues. An outstanding orator, he earned a reputation as an expert on the Negro problem and was consulted by Lincoln and other notables, which added further to his luster.
He ultimately acquired a civil service appointment, a white wife, and had a term as minister to Haiti. The failure of other Negroes to reach similar heights is sometimes attributed to strong competition by Douglass for the available limelight. The Reconstruction era pushed many Negroes into political positions for which they had little taste or talent. Their record is as respectable as can be expected from their backgrounds. They depended heavily on white guidance in all offices, and many of their mistakes were, due to the baleful influence of radical white demagogues. Those elected to national office were generally mulattoes (sic) possessing all the social and genetic benefits such status confers. (25). The emancipation of the Negro provided many opportunities for ambitious freedmen. There was no competition with whites for top posts in a multitude of exclusively Negro social, political, religious, charitable, and educational organizations. Black leaders matured their talents in this less competitive environment and often achieved a degree of recognition they would not have merited in the larger society. Negroes thus became conspicuous on the strength of accomplishments that were trivial and routine in the white community. Booker T. Washington and W. F. DuBois Two Negroes escaped from the footnotes of history by virtue of their championship of conflicting Negro ideologies. Washington advocated vocational training to make Negroes self-supporting in a harmonious segregated society; DuBois was a pioneer militant who was determined to achieve rapid social equality in an integrated society. The former was fathered by an unknown white man in rural Virginia; the latter was born with French and Dutch ancestry in Massachusetts. They thus typified the prevailing sectional philosophies. Washington transformed Tuskegee Institute in Alabama into a model school; DuBois was one of the founders of the NAACP. Both would have gone unnoticed if equipped with pure white skins.
The anemic content of Black History has been briefly reviewed. This review is brief because the material is scanty. Yet university departments hope to turn out specialists in this subject. How graduates who concentrated on Black Studies are supposed to take a respected place alongside scholars in other disciplines is left unanswered. It seems that the teaching of distorted Negro history is designed to combat racism. How fables and fallacies are supposed to end one type of error without creating another is also left unanswered. It has become fashionable to suppress uncomfortable truths. Race science has been driven to the catacombs; constitutional precedents no longer rule the courts; religion has been replaced by a social gospel; schools indoctrinate rather than educate, and now it appears that history must become propaganda. Before the subject is abolished, we ought to recall the one lesson it has always taught: truth cannot be sacrificed. This means that any compromise with error is doomed to fail. Science, Law, Religion, and Education have already been placed on the altar of appeasement in the vain hope of achieving social and racial harmony. The stresses in our society have not diminished; rather they have grown in strength. To add History to these earlier victims will not help. The white race needs the inspiration of its history. To bargain away the glories of Caucasian achievement may bargain away the future of this old and magnificent race.
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