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58  The Last Repatriationist: The Career of Earnest Sevier Cox John P. Jackson, Jr. Andrew S. Winston Introduction “Race,” the infamous British anatomist Robert Knox declared in 1850, “is everything: literature, science, art; in a word, civilization, depends on it.”1 Civilization for Knox was biological, resting as it did on a substrate of race. Outspoken in his belief that the colonial regime of the British Empire was a biological mistake, Knox insisted, “If we now inquire into the history of the Anglo-Saxon colonies we shall find that on quitting his native soil the Saxon loses all respect for it. He is totally devoid of the weakness called patriotism. His adopted land becomes his fatherland.” Nor, Knox warned, should the Saxon colonizer believe that civilization could be brought to those unlike the Saxon himself, for “all races of men equal to a social condition, which in courtesy we may call civilization, will, I think, obey the law if made by themselves; law and government are identical and nearly synonymous terms. If in accordance with their race, the law is obeyed cheerfully.”2 The law was biological, and biology dictated that the races not intermingle in the same nation. For Knox, only by complete and utter geographical separation could racial integrity be maintained. Views such as Knox’s resonated with the racist writers of the United States. In his magisterial history of the ideology of white supremacy in the American South, Joel Williamson identified a stream of “radical” thought that maintained that the Negro had no place in the United States, even under conditions of racial segregation.3 These views were not confined to Southerners. New York Nordicist Madison Grant, for instance, noted that geographical proximity was a biological disaster: “Where two distinct species are located side by side, history and biology teach that but one of two things can happen; either one race drives the other out, as the Americans exterminated the Indians and as the Negroes are now replacing the whites in various parts of the south; or else they amalgamate and form a population of race bastards in which the lower type ultimately preponderates.”4 His colleague Lothrop Stoddard agreed, writing against both “doctrinaire liberals,” who believed in racial equality, and “doctrinaire imperialists, who maintained the equally imperceptible right of their particular nation to ‘vital expansion’ regardless of injuries thereby inflicted upon other The Last Repatriationist  59 nations.”5 Segregation, as practiced in the American South, and colonialism, as practiced all over the world, were for these thinkers biologically unsound legal regimes. They believed that the races must be kept geographically isolated for each to live in a biologically suitable civilization. The uniting of anticolonialism and antisegregation may look odd to twenty-first-century eyes because “the ideology of imperialism did inspire the architects of segregation in the United States and South Africa.”6 Moreover, the rejection of racism in the latter half of the twentieth century was concomitant with the rise of anticolonial movements that made common cause with racial egalitarianism. Richard King, among others, has traced how “after World War II, just as the colonial empires were on the verge of collapse; ideologies of universal equality, independence, and democratic self-rule were gathering support in the West.”7 The writings of Knox, Grant, and Stoddard make clear that the link between anticolonialism and antiracism is contingent rather than necessary. Throughout the history of racist thought, an alternative thread has been an anticolonialism and antisegregation version of scientific racism. In the United States, one way this thread of thought manifested itself was in the ongoing attempt to completely remove African Americans from American soil. These attempts began in 1817 with the foundation of the American Colonialization Society based on the idea that “blacks represented a danger to the order, stability, and progress of white civilization. It also represents irrefutable evidence of the whites’ persisting belief that there were vast differences between themselves and the Negroes.”8 The repatriation of African Americans “back” to Africa waxed and waned throughout the nineteenth century. Throughout his long life, Earnest Sevier Cox (1880–1965) was the most important white spokesman for the repatriation of African Americans to Africa in the twentieth century. Cox had enjoyed some political and legal success in the 1920s by championing the Virginia Racial Integrity Act, which strengthened the state’s antimiscegenation laws. His views on the necessity of repatriating African Americans were driven by an extreme scientific racism that was intellectually respectable in the 1920s...

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