Slavery -- United States; United States -- Politics and government -- 1861-1865; United States -- Race relations
In the south, where reversion to West African society has been checked by
white government, this is a full catalogue of the main institutions
evolved by the freedmen. They have provided themselves with cheaply built
churches, in which their frequent and long worship is mainly sound and
fury. In the pinch of crop cultivation or gathering they flock away from
the fields to excursion trains and "protracted meetings." Perhaps their
most noticeable institutions are "societies," some prohibiting hiring as
domestic servants, except where subsistence cannot otherwise be had, and
others providing the means of decent burial. Compare these feeble negro
race performances with such white institutions, made in the same territory
and at the same time, as Memorial Day, which the north has adopted; the Ku
Klux Klan; enactment of stock laws when the freedmen's refusal to split
rails made much fencing impossible; and the white primary.
Institutions--what I have just called the collective achievement of a
race--mark in their character its capacity for improvement, and also its
plane of development. When the negro, with his self-evolved institutions,
is compared with the race which has furnished itself with fit organs of
self-government all the way up from town-meeting to federal constitution,
and is now about to crown its grand work with direct legislation, it is
like comparing the camel dressed to counterfeit an elephant, of which dear
old Peter Parley told us in his school history, with a real elephant, or
trying to make a confederate dollar in an administrator's return of 1864
count as a gold one.
And yet the negro, Professor Kelly Miller, replying to Tom Watson, assumes
that Franks, Britons, Germans, Russians, and Aztecs have severally been in
historical times as incapable as West Africans of rising from savagery and
crossing barbarism into civilization. He outdoes even this--he would have
it believed that Hayti is now a close second behind Japan in striding
progress.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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