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Race, women and health · Claim record

The same article included a section headed "Negro Characteristics" which generalised about racial character in terms of praise, saying that black Americans were "peaceful and law-abiding" and that "as a race they are happy, gentle, affectionate and humorous".

Claim ID claim-attitudes-race-1920-negro-characteristicsConcerns 26 May 1920Explicit statement
Explicit statement · 26 May 1920 Verified

The same article included a section headed "Negro Characteristics" which generalised about racial character in terms of praise, saying that black Americans were "peaceful and law-abiding" and that "as a race they are happy, gentle, affectionate and humorous". The Golden Age, 26 May 1920The Golden Age, 26 May 1920

Show the evidence (2 sources)
Primary JW publication Verified

The Golden Age, “Facts About the American Negro — Negro Characteristics”

26 May 1920 · pp.551-552 · Woodworth, Hudgings and Martin, Brooklyn, New York

“the faithfulness of Negroes has endeared them to true Americans in all ages. … The Negroes are peaceful and law-abiding. They have never been accused of night-riding and lynching. They have shown that they can suffer without becoming embittered, and can forgive those who have done them wrong. As a race they are happy, gentle, affectionate and humorous; and most of them are honest and industrious.”

A sub-section of the same unsigned cover article. It is offered in the black population's defence, against the claim that black Americans were disorderly, and it is immediately followed by an anecdote about a former slave who returned each Christmas to his old master. The section "The Negro and The South" that follows says the best type of Southerner "tries to be just to the Negro and to avoid pampering him".

Scan of original

Provenance and verification note

Confidence note. Read page by page from the item's djvu.xml on 19 September 2026; the passage straddles the leaves numbered 551 and 552 of the 26 May 1920 issue. Wording confirmed; OCR damage repaired.

Scan provenance. Internet Archive item “Magazines: The golden age, 1920”.

Corroborated by. src-race-ga-1920-0526-american-negro-lynching

Notes. The section stands between the lynching figures and the account of a former slave who returned each Christmas to his old master, inside an article written against the treatment of black Americans.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-race-ga-1920-0526-negro-characteristics

Primary JW publication Verified

The Golden Age, “Facts About the American Negro”

26 May 1920 · pp.547-552 · Woodworth, Hudgings and Martin, Brooklyn, New York

“For two centuries the American people as a whole profited by the unpaid labor of the Negro and then set him adrift, ragged, unguided and unlettered, to assume the burdens of citizenship and to be further exploited by politicians, to his real injury. … In the thirty years, 1889-1918, lynching mobs murdered 3,224 persons in the United States, of whom 2,522 were Negroes and 702 were white persons.”

The unsigned cover article of the issue runs to six pages. It traces the slave trade, notes that New England capital financed it, gives census and occupational statistics, describes black economic advance in the Mississippi delta, and reprints at length a Chattanooga Times account of a lynching by torture. It closes by saying the remedy for "the injustices the Negro has suffered, and still suffers" is the coming Kingdom.

Scan of original

Provenance and verification note

Confidence note. Read page by page from the item’s djvu.xml on 19 September 2026 and re-checked independently. The article opens on the leaf mapped to printed page 547, which carries the masthead “New York, Wednesday, May 26, 1920 Number 18” with the title set around it as “FACTS ABOUT THE … AMERICAN NEGRO”, and runs to the leaf mapped to page 552; the next article, “An Alaskan Gold Tragedy”, begins on page 553. The issue’s own contents page lists the article and its sub-sections. The first sentence quoted stands on page 547 and the lynching figures on page 550. The article carries no by-line. OCR artefacts corrected against the surrounding text; the page images were not separately inspected.

Scan provenance. Internet Archive item “Magazines: The golden age, 1920”; printed page numbers from the item's page_numbers.json checked against the running head “The Golden Age for May 26, 1920”.

Corroborated by. src-race-ga-1920-0526-negro-characteristics

Notes. The critical sites consulted for this topic do not cite this article. It is the longest treatment of race in the 1920 volume and takes the opposite side from the magazine’s harsher race material.

Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-race-ga-1920-0526-american-negro-lynching

Claim page Correct or update

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