negro slaves
Posted Mar 2, 2011 by anonymous | 116 views | 0 comments
The term negro, derived from the Spanish and the Latin words meaning 'black' (negro; niger), may be applied to a large portion of mankind, but it is more strictly confined to certain peoples and tribes of Central Africa and their descendants in various parts of the world. The Bluemback fivefold division of mankind considers the negro in the first place under Ethiopian, embracing the Kafir, Hottentot, Australian, Alforian, and Oceanic negroes. Pritchard and Latham rightly protest against the error of considering the term negro synonymous with African. There are dark-skinned people of various types throughout the tropical countries of the world. The negro properly so called is dark-skinned, with wooly hair and other characteristics, while differing in minor traits. It is a mistake to hold, as some do, that all negroes have common traits. Professor Jerome Dowd, a Southern white man, declares that 'to speak of all negroes in Africa as one race having common characteristics, is as misleading and is as unscientific as if we should consider all Europeans and Americans as of one race and attribute to all of them the same traits.' Observations and the records of the African continent go to show that it is not necessarily the races with the blackest skins that are lowest in the scale of civilization. The negro is originally a native of the Sudan and other parts of West and Central Africa, where there is now [1910] a population of about 128,000,000 blacks. In the West Indies, South America, and the United States they are the descendants of Africans, though in the United States those of mixed blood, the mulattoes, and even those with a preponderance of white blood are classed as negroes.
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