Southern States -- Social conditions; United States -- Race relations
(12) Negroes must be "kept in their place," otherwise there will be
general rapine and destruction.
Some curious errors of perspective are discernible in this picture: the
Negro is at the same time the best laborer and the worst laborer; the
South continues to make great sacrifices to educate blacks who will not
work and who fill the prisons; the mulatto is at the same time dying out
and furnishing five sixths of the colored population of a large city. Such
generalizations are the daily food of the South. Judge Norwood, of
Georgia, on retiring from the bench of the city court of Savannah, where
he had tried twelve thousand colored people, recently left on record his
formal opinion that the Negro never works except from necessity or
compulsion, has no initiative, is brutal to his family, recognizes no
government except force, knows neither ambition, honor nor shame,
possesses no morals; and the judge protests against "the insanity of
putting millions of semi-savages under white men's laws for their
government." The mayor of Winona, Miss., publicly announces that "The
negro is a lazy, lying, lustful animal, which no conceivable amount of
training can transform into a tolerable citizen." Senator Tillman, of
South Carolina, on the floor of the Senate has said: "So the poor African
has become a fiend, a wild beast, seeking whom he may devour, filling our
penitentiaries and our jails." Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, in his
farewell message to the Legislature, in January, 1908, called the Negroes,
who are in a majority in his state: "A race inherently unmoral, ignorant
and superstitious, with a congenital tendency to crime, incapable
unalterably of understanding the meaning of free government, devoid of
those qualities of mind and body necessary to self-control, and being
unable to control themselves."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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