Light Ahead for the NegroJohnson, Edward A. (Edward Austin)
Science
Light Ahead for the Negro
Johnson, Edward A. (Edward Austin)
African Americans; United States -- Race relations
“Many Negroes thought, with Bishop Turner and John Temple Graves, that
emigration was the solution of the problem; not necessarily emigration
from the United States, but emigration individually to states where
public sentiment had not been wrought up against them. But the Negro,
owing to his ignorance, and also to his affection for the land of his
birth, and on account of a peculiar provincialism that narrowed his
scope of vision of the world and its opportunities, could not bring
himself to leave the South, so far as the great mass was concerned.
Then, too, he had been told that the Yankees would not treat him like
the Southerner, and Southern newspapers took especial pains to publish
full details of all the lynchings that occurred in the North and make
suggestive comments on them, in which they endeavored to show that the
whole country was down on the Negro, and that while in the South the
whites lynched only the one Negro against whom they had become enraged,
in the North they mobbed and sought to drive out _all_ the Negroes in
the community where the crime had been committed. (The two clippings
below occurred in the same issue of a Southern paper and showed how,
while the North was mobbing a Negro, the South was honoring one.)[4]
“Instances of white mechanics North who were refusing to work with
Negroes, and instances of Northern hotels refusing them shelter were
also made the most of and served the purpose of deterring Negro
emigration from the Southern States. Frequently some Negro was brought
home dead, or one who had contracted disease in the North came home
and died. These occurrences were also used as object lessons and had
their effect.
“In fact, the Southern white people did not want the Negroes to leave.
They wanted them as domestics, on the farm, and as mechanics. They knew
their value as such. ‘Be as intelligent, as capable as you may but
acknowledge my superiority,’ was the unspoken command.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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