new the black man chiefly as a legend or occasional
curiosity, but still as a fellow man--an Othello or a Prester John or an
Antar.

The modern world, in contrast, knows the Negro chiefly as a bond slave in
the West Indies and America. Add to this the fact that the darker races in
other parts of the world have, in the last four centuries, lagged behind
the flying and even feverish footsteps of Europe, and we face to-day a
widespread assumption throughout the dominant world that color is a mark
of inferiority.

The result is that in writing of this, one of the most ancient,
persistent, and widespread stocks of mankind, one faces astounding
prejudice. That which may be assumed as true of white men must be proven
beyond peradventure if it relates to Negroes. One who writes of the
development of the Negro race must continually insist that he is writing
of a normal human stock, and that whatever it is fair to predicate of the
mass of human beings may be predicated of the Negro. It is the silent
refusal to do this which has led to so much false writing on Africa and
of its inhabitants. Take, for instance, the answer to the apparently
simple question "What is a Negro?" We find the most extraordinary
confusion of thought and difference of opinion. There is a certain type in
the minds of most people which, as David Livingstone said, can be found
only in caricature and not in real life. When scientists have tried to
find an extreme type of black, ugly, and woolly-haired Negro, they have
been compelled more and more to limit his home even in Africa. At least
nine-tenths of the African people do not at all conform to this type, and
the typical Negro, after being denied a dwelling place in the Sudan, along
the Nile, in East Central Africa, and in South Africa, was finally given a
very small country between the Senegal and the Niger, and even there was
found to give trace of many stocks. As Winwood Reade says, "The typical
Negro is a rare variety even among Negroes."

As a matter of fact we cannot take such extreme and largely fanciful stock
as typifying that which we may fairly call the Negro race. In the case of
no other race is so narrow a definition attempted. A "white" man may be of
any color, size, or facial conformation and have endless variety of
cranial measurement and physical characteristics. A "yellow" man is
perhaps an even vaguer conception.

In fact it is generally recognized to-day that no scientific definition of