A Review Of Hoffmans Race Traits And Tendencies Of The American Negro The American Negro Academy Occasional Papers No 1

Dr. Kelly Miller wrote this text in reply to Frederick Ludwig Hoffman, debunking many of the author's points regarding the characteristics and behaviors of black American people. Hoffman's treatise contained a number of incorrect assertions regarding the black American peoples and their condition. Its central tenet is that the black American race is decaying both physically and morally due to a number of innate 'race traits'. Contrasting this opinion, Miller attributes said criticisms not to biological defects, but inferior environmental and social conditions endured by black Americans in the Reconstruction era. Point by point, Miller tackles Hoffman's assertions on black population levels, rates of birth and death, the notion that black Americans are on a trend to become extinct, physical morphology and characteristics, and the social conditions that most reside in. An eloquent and concise counter-thesis is built by Miller, who offers readers a compelling picture of life for African Americans, with the powerful argument backed by facts that the prime cause of any decline is the degraded and impoverished social conditions that many blacks live under. Kelly Miller was a famed author in the early 20th century, who did much to advance African American tutoring in the American education system. His greatest fame was in the field of mathematics, which he taught in academia for decades. An early proponent of civil rights for black Americans, Dr. Miller was outraged by the reticence and lack of action by the U.S. government as lynchings became commoner in the 1910s and 1920s, terming the lack of state support a 'disgrace of democracy'.

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Reproduction of the original: A Review of Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro by Kelly Miller

"[...]11.93 If we begin with 1810, the first census year after the constitutional suppression of the slave trade, we see from this table that the growth of the Negro element followed the ordinary law of population, viz: a gradual decline in the rate of increase. In 70 years the decennial rate of increase declined from about 30 per cent to 22 per cent. But from 1880 to 1890 there was a per saltum decrease from 22 to 13 per cent-that is, the decline in ten years was equal to that of the previous seventy. And all this has happened during an era of profound peace and prosperity, when the Negro population was subject to no great perturbing influences. When a number of[...]".

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