Negro and the Indian, and the Caucasian and the Indian is appreciable, and problems arising from it are serious.
It is absolutely impossible to ascertain the number of mulattoes—that is, persons having both Caucasian and Negro blood in their veins—in the United States. Mr. Baker[2] says: "I saw plenty of men and women who were unquestionably Negroes, Negroes in every physical characteristic, black of countenance with thick lips and kinky hair, but I also met men and women as white as I am, whose assertions that they were really Negroes I accepted in defiance of the evidence of my own senses. I have seen blue-eyed Negroes and golden-haired Negroes; one Negro girl I met had an abundance of soft, straight, red hair. I have seen Negroes I could not easily distinguish from the Jewish or French types; I once talked with a man I took at first to be a Chinaman but who told me he was a Negro. And I have met several people, passing everywhere for white, who, I knew, had Negro blood."
A separate enumeration of mulattoes has been made four times—in 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1890 respectively. The census authorities themselves said that the figures were of little value, and any attempt to distinguish Negroes from mulattoes was abandoned in the census of 1900. If a person is apparently white, the census enumerator will feel a delicacy in asking him if he has Negro blood in his veins. If the enumerator does ask the question and if the other is honest in his answer, it is often that the latter does not know his own ancestry. Dr. Booker T. Washington, for instance, has said that he does not know who his father was.[3] Marital relations among Negroes during slavery were so irregular, and illicit intercourse between
