Southern States -- Social conditions; United States -- Race relations
As for a remedy, nobody seems able to suggest anything that has so far
worked. A recent writer soberly suggests that a way out is to make a
pariah of the mulatto, including that part of the mulattoes who are born
of mulatto or negro parents; they are to be shut from the schools,
excluded from all missionary efforts, made a race apart; and that action
he thinks would be a moral lesson to the full-blooded Africans! Another
method is that of the anti-miscegenation league of Vicksburg, Miss., which
aims to make public the names of offenders and to prosecute them. A better
remedy would be the systematic application of the existing laws of the
state, with at least as much zeal as is given to the enforcement of the
Jim Crow laws. In the last resort there is no remedy except such an
awakening of public sentiment as will drive out of the ranks of
respectable men and women those who practice these vices. Such a sentiment
exists in the churches, the philanthropic societies, and an army of
straightforward sensible men and women. The evil is probably somewhat
abating; but till it is far reduced how can anybody in the South argue
that education and material improvement of the Negro are what most
powerfully tends to social equality? Just so far as the negro man and the
negro woman are, by a better station in life, by aroused self-respect and
race pride, led to protect themselves, so far will this evil be
diminished.
The subject cannot be left without taking ground upon the underlying
issue. All the faults of the Southern men who are practical amalgamators
add weight to the bottom contention of the South that a mixture of the
races, now or in the future, would be calamitous. That belief rests upon
the conviction that the negro race, on the average, is below the white
race; that it can never be expected to contribute anything like its
proportion of the strength of the community; and hence to fuse the races
means slight or no elevation for the Negro, and a great decline for the
white race. With that belief the writer coincides. The union of the two
races means a decline in the rate of civilization; and the fact that so
much of it is going on is not a reason for legalizing it, but for sternly
suppressing it. If amalgamation is dangerous and would pull down the
standard of that higher part of the community which must always be
dominant, then such steps must be taken in all justice, in all humanity,
with all effort to raise both races, as are necessary to prevent
amalgamation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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