Mixed Race Studies

Alden J. Blethen vs. Jack Johnson

The Seattle Republican
Seattle, Washington
Volume XV, Number 43
1909-03-19
page 1, column 3
Source: United States Library of Congress: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

How perfectly natural for some folk to strain at a gnat and yet gulp down a camel; to see a pigeon on a barn, but not observe the barn; to struggle to remove a mote from the other fellow’s eye and overlook the beam in his own. Thus it is with the editor of the Seattle Daily Times, who for the past ten days or more has been in a veritable state of hysteria over “Jack Johnson and his white wife,” and has felt called upon to station himself upon the watch wall of “white supremacy” to give the danger alarm of black men capturing white women. The colonel has been seeing things for a number of years and his state of mind is evidently not improving.

If it be true, as the editor of the Times alleges, “that the people of this part of the world are distinctly opposed to miscegenation,” then we are at a loss to account for the four million half caste white and black folk “in this part of the world.” By “the people” we judge the editor of the Times means the white men “in this part of the world,” and yet we would hate to think the editor of the Times is despicable enough to charge even by inuendo that the white women are responsible for the four million mulatoes, yet they must be if the white men are as bitterly opposed to the miscegenation of black and white folks as the editor of the Times declares they are, or the white men “of this part of the world” encourage the misegenation of white men black amoritas, but do not favor equal privileges to the white women for black Othellos.

The editor of the Times goes on record as having no sympathy for a black man marrying or cohabiting with a white woman, but is as silent as the moonbeams about the white man and the black woman. But all of this claptrap about “Johnson and his white wife” is a gallery play to popularize the paper by inciting race strife. Tillman made himself not only United States senator, but a millionaire as well by playing on the same vulgar violin of race prejudice and did so when there was no more actual danger of “nigger dominancy” in the South than there was of Indian dominancy in the West. We are not advocates of black and white miscegenation but despite our protest the white man plunges headlong into the black sea of miscegenation and is thereby slowly but surely absorbing the black man, and in a half century more the black man, like lo the poor Indian, will be the white man.