The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United StatesWells-Barnett, Ida B.
History
The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States
Wells-Barnett, Ida B.
African Americans -- History -- 1877-1964; Lynching -- United States; Lynching -- United States -- Statistics
temperance at the polls tomorrow; but tomorrow twenty-five cents changes
that vote in favor of the liquor-seller.
"I pity the southerners, and I believe the great mass of them are as
conscientious and kindly intentioned toward the colored man as an equal
number of white church-members of the North. Would-be demagogues lead
the colored people to destruction. Half-drunken white roughs murder them
at the polls, or intimidate them so that they do not vote. But the
better class of people must not be blamed for this, and a more
thoroughly American population than the Christian people of the South
does not exist. They have the traditions, the kindness, the probity, the
courage of our forefathers. The problem on their hands is immeasurable.
The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grog-shop is
its center of power. 'The safety of woman, of childhood, of the home, is
menaced in a thousand localities at this moment, so that the men dare
not go beyond the sight of their own roof-tree.' How little we know of
all this, seated in comfort and affluence here at the North, descanting
upon the rights of every man to cast one vote and have it fairly
counted; that well-worn shibboleth invoked once more to dodge a living
issue.
"The fact is that illiterate colored men will not vote at the South
until the white population chooses to have them do so; and under similar
conditions they would not at the North." Here we have Miss Willard's
words in full, condoning fraud, violence, murder, at the ballot box;
rapine, shooting, hanging and burning; for all these things are done and
being done now by the Southern white people. She does not stop there,
but goes a step further to aid them in blackening the good name of an
entire race, as shown by the sentences quoted in the paragraph above.
These utterances, for which the colored people have never forgiven Miss
Willard, and which Frederick Douglass has denounced as false, are to be
found in full in the Voice of October 23,1890, a temperance organ
published at New York City.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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