Southern States -- Social conditions; United States -- Race relations
The allegation frequently made that these crimes are committed by highly
educated Negroes, graduates of Hampton and Tuskegee, is absolutely without
foundation. Most of them are by men of the lowest type, some undoubtedly
maniacs. Most of these occurrences take place where the Whites and Negroes
are most closely brought into juxtaposition, sometimes where they are both
working in the fields. Hence they are of rare occurrence where the Whites
are fewest and the Negroes most numerous. In many places in the Black
Belt, white people have no fear of leaving their families, because sure
that their negro neighbors would give their lives, if necessary, for the
protection of the white women. The Northern white teachers, who are
accused of arousing in the Negro's mind the belief that he is the equal of
the Whites, have never in a single instance been attacked; and in
communities where the Negroes are literally fifty to one, have not the
slightest fear of going about alone at any necessary hour of day or night.
These statements are not intended to minimize the dreadful effects of a
crime which brings such wretchedness upon the innocent. The two worst
enemies of the white woman in the South are "The Black Brute," whom the
Southern press is never tired of describing in unrepeatable terms, and the
white buzzard journalist who spreads her name and her dreadful story
abroad to become the seed of another like crime. Where is the Southern
chivalry and respect for white women when every such crime is sought out
and flashed abroad, in all the details obtainable, and the victim is
doomed to a second wrong in the lifelong feeling that she is known and
branded throughout the land?
A general and well-grounded complaint is that any fugitive, no matter what
his reason for flight, even though he is guilty of rape, is fed and sent
on his way by his own people, a practice which goes back to slavery days
when there were many strays whose only offense was a love of liberty. "The
worst feature," says an observer, "is that other negroes help to conceal
them and their crimes. They seem to have entered into a racial agreement
that they must help each one of their race to escape the penalties of the
white man's law by resorting to every artifice of untruthfulness and
concealment." Judge Cann, of Georgia, charges that "as a race, negroes
shelter, conceal and protect the criminals of their race; that they
produce riots by attacking officers of the law while in the discharge of
their duty; that they openly show sympathy with the negro criminal; that
they conspire against the enforcement of law; that they have made first a
hero, and then a martyr, of a legally convicted and executed murderer."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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