The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial IssueVarious
History
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue
Various
African Americans -- Social conditions -- To 1964; Civil rights movements; Martin Luther King, Jr., Day; United States -- History
The most intelligent whites are beginning to realize that they cannot go
much higher than they lift the negro at the same time. When a black man
owns and cultivates the best farm to be found in his county he will have
the confidence and respect of most of the white people in that county.
When a black man is the largest taxpayer in his community his white
neighbor will not object very long to his voting, and having that vote
honestly counted. Even now a black man who has five hundred dollars to
lend has no trouble in finding a white man who is willing to borrow his
money. The negro who is a large stockholder in a railroad company will
always be treated with justice on that railroad.
Many of the most intelligent colored people are learning that while
there are many bad white men in the South, there are Southern whites who
have the highest interests of the negro just as closely at heart as have
any other people in any part of the country. Many of the negroes are
learning that it is folly not to cultivate in every honorable way the
friendship of the white man who is their next-door neighbor.
To describe the work being done in connection with the public schools
by graduates of Tuskegee and other institutions in the South, at
such places as Mount Meigs, under Miss Cornelia Bowen; Denmark, South
Carolina; Abbeville and Newville, Alabama; Christiansburg, Virginia, and
numbers of other places in the Gulf States, would be only to repeat in a
larger or smaller degree what I have said of Snow Hill.
Not very long after the last national election I visited a town in the
South, to speak at a meeting which had for its object the raising of
money to complete the school-house. The audience was about equally
divided between white men and women and black men and women. When the
time for the collection came it was intensely satisfactory to observe
that the white side of the audience was just as eager to make its small
contributions as were the members of my own race. But I was anxious to
see how the late election had been conducted in that community. I soon
found out that the Republican party, composed almost wholly of the black
people, was represented by an election officer in the person of one of
the best-educated colored men in the town, that both the Democratic and
Populist parties were equally well represented, and that there was no
suspicion of unfairness.
But I wished to go a little deeper, and I soon found that one of the
leading stores in this community was owned by a colored man; that a
cotton-gin was owned by a colored man; that the sawmill was owned by
another colored man. Colored men had mortgages on white men's crops, and
vice versa, and colored people not only owned land, but in several cases
were renting land to white men. Black men were in debt to white men,
and white men were in debt to black men. In a word, the industrial and
commercial relations of the races were interwoven just as if all had
been of one race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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