Racism and Intelligence Test Scores | Facing History & Ourselves
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Racism and Intelligence Test Scores

Learn more about the history of intelligence tests and how test results were used to help justify discrimination in the 1900s.
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At a Glance

Reading

Language

English — US

Subject

  • History
  • Racism

Racism and Intelligence Test Scores

Dehumanizing Language Note: We have chosen to include certain racial epithets in this reading in order to honestly communicate the bigoted language of the time. 


Carl Brigham’s A Study of American Intelligence confirmed the prejudices of many people and therefore helped justify discrimination. By 1924, writes psychologist Fred Kuhlman, intelligence tests now had “an extra-scientific interest.” “They decide the fate of thousands of human beings every year and are intimately related to social welfare in general.” The tests were increasingly used to identify, segregate, and shame not only individuals but also entire groups of people. For example, Henry Fairfield Osborn, a trustee of Columbia University and president of the American Museum of Natural History, summarized the conclusions he and others drew from those data:

We have learned once and for all that the Negro is not like us. So in regard to many races and subraces in Europe we learned some which we had believed possessed of an order of intelligence perhaps superior to ours were far inferior. 1

In an article in the Atlantic Monthly, another writer noted that 89 percent of African Americans had tested as “morons.” She made no mention of the fact that so did the mayor of Chicago and much of his staff. Instead she concluded that the “education of the whites and colored in separate schools may have justification other than that created by race prejudice.” 2 Journalist Walter Lippmann challenged those who reached such conclusions:

Without offering any data on all that occurs between conception and the age of kindergarten, they announce on the basis of what they have got out of a few thousand questionnaires that they are measuring the hereditary mental endowment of human beings. Obviously this is not a conclusion obtained by research. It is a conclusion planted by the will to believe. It is, I think, for the most part unconsciously planted. 3

Sociologist W. E. B. DuBois, the first African American to earn a Ph.D., was also outraged by those who claimed that intelligence tests “proved” that Black people were inferior:

For a century or more it has been the dream of those who do not believe Negroes are human that their wish should find some scientific basis. For years they depended on the weight of the human brain, trusting that the alleged underweight of less than a thousand Negro brains, measured without reference to age, stature, nutrition, or cause of death, would convince the world that black men simply could not be educated. Today scientists acknowledge that there is no warrant for such a conclusion and that in any case the absolute weight of the brain is no criterion of racial ability.

Measurements of the bony skeleton followed and great hopes of the scientific demonstration of racial inferiority were held for a while. But they had to be surrendered when Zulus and Englishmen were found in the same . . . class.

Then came psychology: the children of the public schools were studied and it was discovered that some colored children ranked lower than white children. This gave wide satisfaction even though it was pointed out the average included most of both races and that considering the educational opportunities and social environment of the races, the differences were measurements simply of the ignorance and poverty of the black child’s surroundings.

Today, however, all is settled. “A workably accurate scientific classification of brain power” has been discovered and by none other than our astute army officers. The tests were in two sets for literates and illiterates and were simplicity itself. For instance among other things the literates were asked in three minutes “to look at each row of numbers below and on the next two dotted lines write the two numbers that should come next.”

  • 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, __, __
  • 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, __, __
  • 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, __, __
  • 81, 27, 9, 3, 1, 1/3, __, __
  • 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, __, __
  • 16, 17, 15, 18, 14, 19, __, __
  • 3, 6, 8, 16, 18, 36, __, __
     

Illiterates were asked, for example, to complete pictures where the net was missing in a tennis court or a ball in a bowling alley!

For these tests were chosen 4730 Negroes from Louisiana and Mississippi and 28,052 white recruits from Illinois. The result? Do you need to ask? M. R. Trabue, Director, Bureau of Educational Service, Columbia University, assures us that the intelligence of the average Race and Membership in American History southern Negro is equal to that of a 9-year-old white boy and that we should arrange our educational program to make “waiters, porters, scavengers, and the like” of most Negroes!

Is it conceivable that a great university should employ a man whose “science” consists of such utter rot? 4

  • 11. Quoted in The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould. W. W. Norton, 1981, p. 231.
  • 2Ibid., p. 231.
  • 3Ibid., p. 174.
  • 4“Race Intelligence” by W. E. B. DuBois. Crisis, July 1920, pp. 1181–1183. ©1920 Crisis.

How to Cite This Reading

Facing History & Ourselves, “Racism and Intelligence Scores,” last updated September 16, 2022. 

This reading contains text not authored by Facing History & Ourselves. See footnotes for source information.

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