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
I have had innumerable illustrations of the extremes to which race feeling
reaches among a certain class of Southerners. In a letter to the Atlanta
_Constitution_, November 5, 1906, a writer who signs himself Mark Johnson,
says:
The only use we have for the Negro is as a labourer. It is only as
such that we need him; it is only as such that we can use him. If the
North wants to take him and educate him we will bid him godspeed and
contribute to his education if schools are located on the other side
of the line.
And here are extracts from a remarkable letter from a Southern white
working man signing himself Forrest Pope and published in the Atlanta
_Georgian_, October 22, 1906:
When the skilled negro appears and begins to elbow the white man in
the struggle for existence, don't you know the white man rebels and
won't have it so? If you don't it won't take you long to find it out;
just go out and ask a few of them, those who tell you the whole
truth, and see what you will find out about it.
_What Is the Negro's Place?_
All the genuine Southern people like the Negro as a servant, and so
long as he remains the hewer of wood and carrier of water, and
remains strictly in what we choose to call his place, everything is
all right, but when ambition, prompted by real education, causes
the Negro to grow restless and he bestir himself to get out of that
servile condition, then there is, or at least there will be, trouble,
sure enough trouble, that all the great editors, parsons and
philosophers can no more check than they can now state the whole
truth and nothing but the truth, about this all-absorbing,
far-reaching miserable race question. There are those among Southern
editors and other public men who have been shouting into the ears of
the North for twenty-five years that education would solve the Negro
question; there is not an honest, fearless, thinking man in the South
but who knows that to be a bare-faced lie. Take a young Negro of
little more than ordinary intelligence, even, get hold of him in
time, train him thoroughly as to books, and finish him up with a good
industrial education, send him out into the South with ever so good
intentions both on the part of his benefactor and himself, send him
to take my work away from me and I will kill him.
[Illustration: COMPANION PICTURES
Old and new cabins for Negro tenants on the Brown plantation]
The writer says in another part of this remarkable letter, giving as it
does a glimpse of the bare bones of the economic struggle for existence:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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