“There is no
hard fast line dividing the two races on the scale of capacity. There is the
widest possible variation within the limits of each. A philosopher and a fool
may be not only members of the same race but of the same family. No scheme of
classification is possible which will include all white men and shut out all
Negroes. According to any test of excellence which you’re and Mr. Watson’s
ingenuity can devise, some Negroes will be superior to some white men; no
stretch or ingenuity or strain of conscience has yet devised a plan of
franchise which includes all members of one race and excludes all those of the
other.
“Learned
opinion on the other side ought, at least, to weigh as much against your thesis
as your own fulminations count in favor of it. You surely have high respect for
the authority of Thomas Jefferson. In a letter to Benjamin Banneker, the Negro
astronomer, the author of the great Declaration of Independence wrote: ‘Nobody
wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit that Nature has given
to our black brethren talents equal to those of other colors of men, and that
the apparent want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their
existence, both in Africa and America.’”
Kelly
Miller, “As to the Leopard’s Spots: An Open Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr.,” in RACE ADJUSTMENT: ESSAYS ON THE NEGRO IN
AMERICA, p.37-38 (1909)
