U[riah] B[oston] to Frederick Douglass, June 24, 1853
Hear the Tribune. "We hold that the
black race must do something to justify
their claim of equality and brotherhood with
the whites, before it will be generally con-
ceded." Now I wish to ask how the black
race can do something to justify their claim
to equality with the whites, in the estimation
of Mr. Greeley, and others who think as he
does? Yet Mr. Greeley wants the free
blacks to go to Liberia, or somewhere else,
to justify their claim to equality with the
whites. And hence Mr. G. is a colonization-
ist. Hear what he says: "Pour one mil-
lion of our blacks into England, and they
would there speedily settle into a position of
social, political, and moral inferiority to the
Anglo-Saxons, as a like number of our white
Yankees, though no better educated, and no
better supplied with property, would not."—Now this social and moral inferiority of the
negro to the Caucasion race, is a fact to
which history, phrenology, literature and sci-
ence bear witness, and nothing is to be
gained, but everything perilled, by pushing
it out of sight. (See Mr. Greeley's reply to
George Downing.)
I must say this is a new idea to me, and I
dare say it is to many others. But I would
respectfully suggest that many will not be-
lieve, from the light of evidence from history
and science, (I leave out that humbug phre-
nology) that the black man's inferiority is a
settled fact. Phrenology may have estab-
blished the fact to the satisfaction of some,
but that is no more strange than that spirit-
ual rappings is the product of phrenology.-
I submit, therefore, that phrenology may be
at fault in this question.
U. B.