Following the color line : $b An account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy
History
Following the color line : $b An account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy
African Americans; United States -- Race relations
One of the most active causes of this movement is downright fear--or race
repulsion expressing itself in fear. White people dislike and fear to live
in dense coloured neighbourhoods, while Negroes are often terrorised in
white neighbourhoods--and not in the South only but in parts of Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, as I shall show when I come to treat of Northern race
conditions. I have accumulated many instances showing how Negroes are
expelled from white neighbourhoods. There is a significant report from
Little Rock, Arkansas:
(_Special to the Georgian._)
Little Rock, Ark., Jan. 1.--Practically every Negro in Evening Shade,
Sharp County, in this state, has left town as the result of threats
which have been made against the Negroes. For several years a small
colony of Negroes has lived just on the outskirts of the town. A
short time ago notices were posted warning the Negroes to leave the
town at once. About the same time Joe Brooks, a Negro who lived with
his family two miles north of town, was called to his door and fired
upon by unknown persons. A load of shot struck the house close by his
side and some of the shot entered his arm. Brooks and his family have
left the country, and practically every member of the Negro colony
has gone. They have abandoned their property or disposed of it for
whatever they could get.
From the New Orleans _Times Democrat_ of March 20, 1907, I cut the
following dispatch showing one method pursued by the whites of Oklahoma:
BLACKS ORDERED OUT
Lawton, Okla., March 20.--"Negroes, beware the cappers. We, the Sixty
Sons of Waurika, demand the Negroes to leave here at once. We mean
Go! Leave in twenty-four hours, or after that your life is
uncertain." These were the words on placards which the eighty Negroes
of the town of Waurika, forty miles south of Lawton, saw posted
conspicuously in a number of public places this morning.
Dispatches from here to-night stated that the whites are in earnest,
and that the Negroes will be killed if they do not leave town.
Not a few students of Southern conditions like John Temple Graves among
the whites and Bishop Turner among the coloured people have argued that
actual physical separation of the races (either by deportation of the
Negroes to Africa or elsewhere, or by giving them certain reservation-like
parts of the South to live in) is the only solution. But here is, in
actuality, a natural segregation going forward in certain parts of the
South, though in a very different way from that recommended by Mr. Graves
and Bishop Turner; for even in the blackest counties the white people own
most of the land, occupy the towns, and dominate everywhere politically,
socially, and industrially.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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