A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro

Dr. Kelly Miller wrote this text in reply to Frederick Ludwig Hoffman, debunking many of the author's points regarding the characteristics and behaviors of black American people. 


Hoffman's treatise contained a number of incorrect assertions regarding the black American peoples and their condition. Its central tenet is that the black American race is decaying both physically and morally due to a number of innate 'race traits'. Contrasting this opinion, Miller attributes said criticisms not to biological defects, but inferior environmental and social conditions endured by black Americans in the Reconstruction era. 


Point by point, Miller tackles Hoffman's assertions on black population levels, rates of birth and death, the notion that black Americans are on a trend to become extinct, physical morphology and characteristics, and the social conditions that most reside in. An eloquent and concise counter-thesis is built by Miller, who offers readers a compelling picture of life for African Americans, with the powerful argument backed by facts that the prime cause of any decline is the degraded and impoverished social conditions that many blacks live under. 


Kelly Miller was a famed author in the early 20th century, who did much to advance African American tutoring in the American education system. His greatest fame was in the field of mathematics, which he taught in academia for decades. An early proponent of civil rights for black Americans, Dr. Miller was outraged by the reticence and lack of action by the U.S. government as lynchings became commoner in the 1910s and 1920s, terming the lack of state support a 'disgrace of democracy'.