Mixed Race Studies

Dr. Eliot Favors Racial Dead Line

The New York Times
1909-03-15
page 3

Declares the South’s Future Depends On the Whites Preserving Their Integrity

MISQUOTED IN INTERVIEW

Did Not Say That Irish and Italians Furnished Race Problem for North Like Negroes In South

ATLANTA, Ga., March 14.—Sharply denying that he had been taken to task by a Massachusetts committee for his recently expressed views on the negro question, ex-President C. W. Eliot of Harvard, who is staying In Atlanta, to-day reiterated his belief that the South is handling the racial problem in the right way, and that the best interests of both whites and blacks require that a racial dead line be established. Racial Intermingling, Dr. Eliot declared, would be fatal to both white and black.

The future of the South depends, according to Dr. Eliot, on the preservation by the whites of their racial integrity, and, therefore, he thinks they are handling the negro problem in the proper way.

“Why you believe,” said Dr. Eliot, “that your race problem is a new one, but it has been experienced before, only it is intensified here. The negro cannot be expected to be ready for all phases of civilization, when he is a few decades removed from the time when he first began to enjoy civilization as a free man. After 500 or 1,000 years we may expect more substantial growth.”

It was Dr. Eliot’s opinion that the negro will need all the professions to enable him to maintain his racial integrity, especially physicians and nurses. Negro women, when properly trained, make good nurses, he said.

Dr. Eliot mentioned the amalgamation of the Germans and Chinese as an admixture of races that had been suggested as being practical, but he said that he did not believe that such an intermingling would stand.

Dr. Eliot said he had been misquoted in the interview sent out from Montgomery, in which he was credited with saying that the Irish and Italians furnished a race problem for the North similar to that created for the South by the negroes. He said that he did not suggest the examples of racial intermingling that were mentioned in the interview, but he repeated the statement that to maintain racial integrity an individuality was a good thing. For that reason he opposed the intermingling of racial stocks, even of the Aryan branch. The fact that a number of races are associated in a country should not prevent them from dwelling together in harmonious relations.

When the English people were cited as an example of intermingling of’ Jutes, Angles, Saxons, and Normans, that was successful, Dr. Eliot replied:

“But notice how long it required for them to unite. Races that dwell together, of course, tend to become similar.”