A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American NegroThe American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1
designated by a different, though an ugly name.

Let us not forget, also, that not more than one-third of the lynchings are even chargeable to rape. The causes include the whole catalogue of offenses, serious and trifling, from the committal of murder to jostling against a white man on the street. The attempt to show that lynching and rape are coextensive is misleading and unjust.

So the effort to show that rapeful assaults are due to “race traits” can, I think, be clearly disproved. In a pamphlet which is certainly [Pg 31]not flattering to the Negro, a learned medical authority tells us: “I might remark in passing that, notwithstanding the horrible crimes perpetrated under the influence of the furor sexualis by the Negro, I believe that he compares quite favorably as regards sexual impulses—taking all abnormalities into consideration—with the white race. The more I see of white men in so-called refined society, the more contempt have I for quite a large proportion of male humanity.”[54]

[Pg 31]

To summarize the points of the argument, showing that rape is not peculiarly characteristic of the Negro:

1. Rape has been practiced among all races and nations.

2. The committal of rape by white men is by no means an infrequent occurrence. Two instances of white men committing heinous assaults upon white children occurred in Washington during the preparation of this article.

3. In Africa rape is so severely punished that it is comparatively unknown.

4. In the British Islands and in South America where the Negroes live in greatest relative abundance, the crime is unheard of.

5. When the care and safety of the white women of the South were entrusted to the keeping of the slaves, they returned inviolable all that had been entrusted to their hands.

6. Of the hundreds of lady missionaries of the North who have trusted their lives and virtue to the emancipated race whom they came to uplift, not a single case of violation has been reported to their friends at the North.

 Social Morality.

Social Morality.

The present state of social morality is mirrored in the number of illegitimate offsprings. The figures which show that the rate of illegitimacy among 
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