The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921Various
History
The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921
Various
African Americans -- Periodicals
We come next to the question: What sort of men are they who make up
these murderous mobs? Wendell Phillips once said, as to the North,
that he had faced many mobs between the seaboard and the Mississippi,
and that he never saw one that did not show that it was inspired if
not actually led by "respectability and what called itself education."
It is harder to know exactly what is the personnel of southern
lynching parties. But a close study of known facts shows that
"respectability and what calls itself education" has countenanced,
approved, and participated in a large proportion of these orgies of
horror. And the southern approval has developed in the South a most
abhorrent type of white woman who holds up her babies to see a black
man cut and burned to death. Miss Grimke's historical accuracy is
unimpeachable when she allows "church members" to lynch Loving and his
stepson.
George W. Cable said to the present writer in the winter of 1888-89,
"You are right, the southerners do not want the Negroes to be
educated." Miss Grimke, inferentially, dates her lynching somewhere in
the decade of the nineties. The mass of black, brown, and
olive-tinted ignorance at that time in the South, was appalling. It is
appalling now--largely through the governing white man's fault. But
still there were in the South at that time and before then many
colored people who had obtained the rudiments of education and some
who might be truthfully called well educated. Some of these became
known to the whole country; but there might easily have been obscure
ones like Loving scattered in many communities.
Now ordinary critics are sure to cry out against my analysis of the
historical situation and remind me of Booker Washington. They will
say, "He was not lynched. He was accepted. Any Negro like him is safe,
if he behaves himself." I answer that I have no fancy for mob murder
or torture of any human being, ignorant or wise, good or bad. There
are, moreover, other answers to the riddle of that great constructive
educator's career. One is creditable to the white southerners. They
are not all eager for Negro blood. There is yet another solution.
Booker Washington surrendered many of the Negro's rights to southern
prejudices. The South liked that surrender. Northern philanthropists
occasionally liked it well enough to give money for purposes which
would tend to make the Negro useful in the ways the whites wanted him
to be, and yet to insure him a little intellectual comfort in his
life.
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