o_ and W.B. Smith's _The Color Line_, while a member
of the race itself, William Hannibal Thomas, published a book, _The
American Negro_, that was without either faith or ideal and as a
denunciation of the Negro in America unparalleled in its vindictiveness
and exaggeration.[2]

[Footnote 1: Its fundamental assumptions were ably refuted by Edward
Atkinson in the _North American Review_, August, 1905.]

[Footnote 2: It was reviewed in the _Dial_, April 16, 1901, by W.E.B.
DuBois, who said in part: "Mr. Thomas's book is a sinister symptom--a
growth and development under American conditions of life which
illustrates peculiarly the anomalous position of black men, and the
terrific stress under which they struggle. And the struggle and the
fight of human beings against hard conditions of life always tends
to develop the criminal or the hypocrite, the cynic or the radical.
Wherever among a hard-pressed people these types begin to appear, it
is a visible sign of a burden that is threatening to overtax their
strength, and the foreshadowing of the age of revolt."]

In January, 1904, the new governor of Mississippi, J.K. Vardaman, in his
inaugural address went to the extreme of voicing the opinion of those
who were now contending that the education of the Negro was only
complicating the problem and intensifying its dangerous features. Said
he of the Negro people: "As a race, they are deteriorating morally every
day. Time has demonstrated that they are more criminal as freemen than
as slaves; that they are increasing in criminality with frightful
rapidity, being one-third more criminal in 1890 than in 1880." A
few weeks later Bishop Brown of Arkansas in a widely quoted address
contended that the Southern Negro was going backward both morally and
intellectually and could never be expected to take a helpful part in the
Government; and he also justified lynching. In the same year one of the
more advanced thinkers of the South, Edgar Gardner Murphy, in _Problems
of the Present South_ was not yet quite willing to receive the Negro on
the basis of citizenship; and Thomas Nelson Page, who had belittled the
Negro in such a collection of stories as _In Ole Virginia_ and in such a
novel as _Red Rock_[1] formally stated his theories in _The Negro: The
Southerner's Problem_. The worst, however--if there could be a worst in
such an array--was yet to appear. In 1905 Thomas Dixon added to a series
of high-keyed novels _The Clansman_, a glorifi