The negro: the southerner's problemPage, Thomas Nelson
History
The negro: the southerner's problem
Page, Thomas Nelson
African Americans; United States -- Race relations
They have some qualities which I cannot even presume to claim in an
equal degree for the people among whom I, myself, dwell. They have
an aptness for command which makes the Southern gentleman, wherever
he goes, not a peer only, but a prince. They have a love for home;
they have, the best of them, and the most of them, inherited from
the great race from which they come, the sense of duty and the
instinct of honor as no other people on the face of the earth. They
are lovers of home. They have not the mean traits which grow up
somewhere in places where money-making is the chief end of life.
They have, above all, and giving value to all, that supreme and
superb constancy which, without regard to personal ambition and
without yielding to the temptation of wealth, without getting tired
and without getting diverted, can pursue a great public object, in
and out, year after year and generation after generation.
This is the race which the Negro confronts. It is a race which,
whatever perils have impended, has always faced them with a steadfast
mind.
Professor James Bryce in a recent paper on the Negro question arrives
at the only reasonable conclusion: that the Negro be let alone
and the solution of the problem be left to the course of events.
Friendship for the Negro demands this. It has become the fashion of
late for certain Negro leaders to talk in conventions held outside of
the South of fighting for their rights. For their own sake and that
of their race, let them take it out in talking. A single outbreak
would settle the question.
To us of the South it appears that a proper race pride is one of
the strongest securities of our nation. No people can become great
without it. Without it no people can remain great. We purpose to
stand upon it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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