Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, July 1899: Volume LV, No. 3, July 1899Various
Religion
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, July 1899: Volume LV, No. 3, July 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
The article which we publish in the present number of the Monthly,
under the title of The Race Problem in the United States, is a sequel
to one which appeared in the May number entitled The Negro Question.
Both writers have a special acquaintance with the subject, and are
widely known as active workers for the elevation of the negro
race--Mr. Booker T. Washington, the writer of the second article,
being himself one of its most distinguished representatives. While
both manifest abundant sympathy with the negro, and a deep sense of
the pressing nature of the problems to which the presence of a large
negro element in the population of certain of our States gives rise,
they virtually acknowledge that it is extremely difficult in
discussing the subject to do more than present a few broad general
views. That there is a very bad condition of things in some of our
Southern States no one will dispute. The crimes which have been
committed by white men, in avenging real or supposed crimes committed
by black men, stamp a character of utter savagery on the communities
in which they have occurred, and in which they have remained
unpunished. At the same time there is no doubt that the existence of
so large a negro element in the South constitutes a serious obstacle
to the moral and intellectual as well as to the economic development
of that part of the country, and tends to keep alive a dangerous
condition of public feeling. Our contributor, Dr. Curry, states
significantly that he could give very impressive details on this
point, were it not that it would furnish altogether too unpleasant
reading.
What are we going to do about it? No doubt we have before us an
illustration of the old adage, "The fathers have eaten sour grapes,
and the children's teeth are set on edge." The South had its "peculiar
institution" for some generations, and held to it with extraordinary
tenacity--went to war rather than give it up. Now, by the simple force
of events, the old patriarchal and slaveholding system is broken up,
and there the former slaves and their descendants are--emancipated
citizens who have their rights under the Constitution, and who
therefore have to be reckoned with. They can not be deported against
their will; they have the same right to live in the country that any
white man has.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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