speedily in full movement, head, arms, eyes, feet, face, and soon he was lost in ecstasy. And the contagion swept everything before it. Even the sound sleepers on the fringe of the crowd were caught and carried into the movement as if by a tide of the sea. At the very climax of the meeting, a woman rose to her feet, moved forward to the open space in front of the pulpit, evidently under the compulsion of the lyric wave. Having reached the front, in one wild burst of pent-up emotion, she fell rigid to the floor and lay there motionless during the rest of the service. Like the devotees of the ghost dance she was believed to be enjoying visions of the unseen world." 1

Under the crowd psychosis of the church the general tendency of religion at all times with the negro is to approximate the revival type in which the emotional phenomena described above are prominent. When the meetings have progressed for days and weeks as they usually do, the congregations become trained, just as do the subjects of the travelling hypnotists, so that great extremes such as catalepsy, convulsions, and similar phenomena are by no means uncommon. A physician of the Yazoo Delta region of Mississippi writes me thus of the case of a negro woman which occurred during one of these revivals. "She was in a house next the church. I

1 Davenport, Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, pp. 50, 51.

found her lying on the bed tossing her arms about and calling upon all the members of the Godhead as loudly as her voice would permit for she had become so hoarse that the most she could do was to whisper. Upon investigation I found she had been to church and the Holy Ghost had 'grabbed' her and waltzed her over the church until she 'fell out,' from overheating presumably. During these spells she gasped and gurgled and simulated the deathrattle so successfully that the good sisters at her bedside were scared nearly witless." In justice to the negro it should be observed, however, that these extreme effects of the crowd psychosis are not limited to the religious life of the negro, but were exceedingly prominent in the famous Scotch-Irish revivals of the early days in Kentucky.1 They are by no means unknown at the camp-meetings of whites to-day in the less progressive sections of the country.

It is a menace to any community to have within it a large group endowed with strong instincts and emotions and weak powers of inhibition. This is illustrated among those sections of our white population where lynchings and night riding and similar mob phenomena are in evidence.2 The negro would be

1 Davenport, op. cit., pp. 78 ff.

2 See Davenport's observations upon Logan, Simpson, and Todd counties of Kentucky, op. cit., pp. 302 ff.

a much greater social menace but for the fact that he combines with his passional and vacillating traits, just described, remarkable submissiveness and lack of group cohesion. More group self-assertion on his part would make the race problem tenfold more difficult than it now is. When stronger group consciousness comes among the negroes, as it is bound to come in time, let us hope that with it will come enlightenment and wise leadership. The impatient, all but militant and anti-social attitude of an influential section of the negro press is to be condemned in this connection.1 These editors show an unfortunate lack of appreciation of the traits of the people they aspire to lead. Their language implies that the negro is only an AngloSaxon who is so unfortunate as to have a black skin. Such a race philosophy only works injustice to the negro himself and it is high time to discard it.

1 See the editorial in the negro journal, the New York Age, March 6, 1913, also the editorial "Anarchism" in the Crisis for Aug., 1913.

CHAPTER III

RACE TRAITS (continued)

THE mobility of temperament, so characteristic of the African negro,1 and doubtless a blessing in many instances to the slave,2 is still exhibited by the negro in other spheres than that of religion. Bruce, as a result of a study of the negro in Southside, Virginia, concluded that unguardedness of temper and a certain superficiality of affection are among the prominent traits of the race. An acquaintance with the home life of the negro in the far South reveals in many instances a recklessness and abandon of temper anything but conducive to conjugal happiness and the rearing of honest and sober citizens. The parent easily flies into a passion and accompanies the punishment with such extravagant expressions as "I'se gwine to skin you alive this time," or "I'll wear you to a frazzle," and after the heat of passion has spent itself and it is realised that the punishment has been

1 Cureau, op. cit., pp. 469 ff. Oetker, op. cit., pp. 12 ff.

• Chambers, Things in America, p. 280. See, however, Fanny Kemble, Journal, p. 101.

3 The Plantation Negro as Freedman, Chs. I, II.

too severe, there is very often a revulsion of feeling in the other direction. The result is that there is often too little real permanent affection in many family groups and frequently all home ties cease when the children become independent. It is in these facts of the home life of the negro, as we shall see in a later chapter, that we are to look primarily for our explanation of the high percentage of criminals that the negroes furnish; it is a familiar fact that in the home circle citizens are either made or marred.

This tropical exuberance of temperament which makes the negro extreme in joy or grief, in anger or affection, together with his strongly sensuous nature are his greatest handicaps in meeting the stern demands of a stable civilisation. They make him an alien in many respects in the midst of a highly rationalised social order. Furthermore, they can hardly be ascribed to his immaturity, for the negro is not a child race. Such traits are hereditary, the result of ages of fixed group life. Hence they persist after many generations of contact with a higher civilisation and after the last vestige of social heritage from Africa has disappeared. We are here dealing with

1 Odum, Social and Mental Traits of the Negro, pp. 161 ff. The picture here drawn is not a bright one, but it is true of many homes of the plantation negroes of the South.

2 Bruce, op. cit., p. 155.