Southern States -- Social conditions; United States -- Race relations
The social organization of the Anglo-Saxons in the South, their relations
with each other, their strife for leadership, takes little account of the
other race, though it is diffused throughout the country; it is everywhere
with the Whites, but not of them. Although to the Southern mind the
community is made up entirely of white people, numerically almost one
third of the inhabitants of the former slaveholding states are Negroes,
and in the Lower South there are five million blacks against seven million
Whites. The moral and material welfare of the South is intimately affected
by their presence, and still more by their character. They are as much
children of the soil as the Whites; they are everywhere distributed,
except in the mountains; their labor is necessary for the prosperity of
the section; they have a social organization of their own and many of the
appliances of civilization; they own some land, travel, are everywhere in
evidence, yet they are distrusted by nearly all the Whites, despised by
more than half of them, and hated by a considerable and apparently
increasing fraction.
Even the names habitually used by the Whites for their neighbors show
contempt. "Nigger," though often used among the blacks, is felt by them to
be depreciatory; "Darky" is jocular; "Negro" is condescending; "Blacks"
as a generic term is incorrect in view of the light color of a large
fraction of the race. Afro-American, the invention of the Negroes, is
pedantic. The Negroes themselves much prefer "Colored person," which is
also a term used in directories.
Every Southern man and woman consciously or unconsciously makes
generalizations as to the whole race from those comparatively few
individuals with whom he is acquainted. Hence conventional and offhand
statements, obviously based upon little direct knowledge of the Negro,
abound in private conversation, in public addresses and in print. For
example, a few months ago the mayor of Houston, himself the son of a
Massachusetts man, who went down to Texas before the Civil War, was led by
an accidental question to deliver an extempore indictment of the whole
negro race under twelve heads then and there noted down as follows:
(1) The old Negroes in slavery times were a good lot, but Negroes nowadays
are worthless.
(2) The Negro is the best laborer that the South ever had.
(3) Education destroys the value of the Negro, by making him unwilling to
work.
(4) The South makes great sacrifices to educate the Negroes.
(5) The Negroes on the farms often do well; but those are the old slaves.
(6) The young Negroes will not work on the land but drift off, probably to
the cities.
(7) The pure Negro is much superior in character to the Mulattoes, who are
the most vicious part of the race.
(8) The mulatto is physically weak and he is rapidly dying out.
(9) Five sixths of all the Negroes in this city have some white blood.
(10) The educated Negroes fill the prisons.
(11) Booker T. Washington has good ideas.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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