INTELLIGENCE AND RACE 



A REVIEW OF SOME OF THE RESULTS OF THE ARMY INTELLI- 

 GENCE TESTS.— II. THE NEGRO 



Paul Popexoe 

 Coach cUa, Calif or n ia 



IN tabulating the results of army 

 tests of intelligence, the psycholo- 

 gists of the Surgeon General's 

 office took a sample of 18,891 negroes 

 for the purposes of analysis.' This 

 gives a more nearly accurate picture 

 of the negro population of the United 

 States than any study hitherto made. 

 While the inferences drawn from an 

 examination of these records bring to 

 light nothing previously unknown, 

 they are of extraordinary value for 

 the confirmation they give to conclu- 

 sions earlier reached by many investi- 

 gators, from other lines of evidence, 

 regarding the mental status of the so- 

 called colored population of the United 

 States. 



For the most part, the army statis- 

 tics do not differentiate between full- 

 blood negroes and mulattoes, and un- 

 c|uestionably a large part of the so- 

 called negroes of the draft have white 

 blood, often to a preponderant extent. 

 The results must be interpreted with 

 this fact in mind, for it is established 

 that the intelligence of a "colored 

 man" depends to a marked degree 

 on the amount of white blood he has." 

 This conclusion, reached by several 

 previous investigators, and supported 

 b}' the verdict of "common sense" ob- 

 servation, is confirmed by several 

 studies of the army psychologists. 



At Camp Lee, for instance, "the 

 experiment was tried of separating 

 some of the negro recruits on the 

 basis of skin color and comparing the 

 intelligence ratings obtained from the 

 lighter and darker groups. The re- 



port describes the experiment as tried 

 on two battalions of negro recruits as 

 follows : 'The lighter class contained 

 those whose color indicated that they 

 were true mulattoes or persons with 

 a larger proportion of white blood 

 than true mulattoes. The darker class 

 contained pure negroes and those 

 whose skin color indicated that they 

 had a smaller proportion of white 

 blood than true mulattoes. The clas- 

 sification was made by the various ex- 

 aminers of the groups. 



" Tn alpha [one of the standard 

 army tests] the lighter negroes ob- 

 tained a median score of 50 ; the dark- 

 er a median score of 30. In beta 

 [another standard test, devised par- 

 ticularly for illiterates and persons 

 unable to speak English] the lighter 

 negroes obtained a median score of 

 36 ; the darker obtained a median of 

 29.' " 



In the data which I am about to 

 present, therefore, it must be borne 

 in mind that the showing of the ne- 

 groes is improved by the presence of 

 much white blood in many of them ; 

 and that to get at the real ability of 

 the black man one would have to sub- 

 tract no small amount from all of 

 the scores to be mentioned. 



Geographical Distribution of 

 Intelligence 



This fact undoubtedly has a bear- 

 ing on the significant revelation of 

 the tests, that the negroes in the 

 Northern States are, on the average, 



"^Memoirs Nat. Acad. Sci. XV (1921) pt. Ill, Ch. 8. 



"Apparently the same holds good for American Indians with various amounts of white 

 blood. See the studies reported by Professor Hunte.r and Mr. Garth at the 1920 meeting of 

 the American Psychological Association, in Chicago. 



295 



