Unfettered: A NovelGriggs, Sutton E. (Sutton Elbert)
General
Unfettered: A Novel
Griggs, Sutton E. (Sutton Elbert)
African Americans -- Fiction; United States -- Race relations -- Fiction
"5. The Negro is impulsive, and is led to act largely by an immediately
exciting stimulus, causing the net results of his labors to appear as a
series of fits and jerks; the Anglo-Saxon is deliberate, cautious without
stagnation, wary and persistent, and his history reveals an unbroken
tendency in a given direction.
"6. Hitherto the preponderating tendency of the Negro has been toward
disintegration, showing the lack of a proper measure of fellow-feeling; the
tendency of the Anglo-Saxon is toward racial integration.
"7. The Negro proceeds by analogies; the Anglo-Saxon by logic.
"8. The Anglo-Saxon is fond of serious discussion and you reach him best
through the sublime; the Negro is inordinately fond of joking and you get
closest to him through the ludicrous. I do not pretend to say that these
are hard and fast lines, separating the Anglo-Saxon and Negro minds into
distinct classes, but they indicate a general unlikeness in many
particulars.
"Now, we Democrats know how to reach Anglo-Saxon minds and the process is
congenial to our general habit of thought. When we address Negroes, we
really have to readjust our faculties of approach. Public speakers find
that various sections of the same country present this difference, even
when all of the people are of the same race. How much greater must be the
chasm between two such widely diverging races."
Morlene exhibited no signs of abating interest, so the lawyer proceeded
further with his remarks.
"Two other reasons may be given why we prefer to be rid of the Negro," he
continued. "The mass of Negroes are poor, some of them very poor, and we
have men among us who would not scruple at perpetually bribing these poor
by little acts of kindness. A poverty stricken, oppressed, helpless people
are comparatively easy prey for the well to do element of an opposite race.
In national politics the Negro's devotion to the Republican party exempts
him from the chicanery of designing whites who would debauch the suffrage.
We do not desire the ignorant Negro vote in municipal affairs for the same
reason that the nations of Europe oppose the dismemberment of Turkey. The
struggle for possession would be too fierce and demoralizing among the
parties desiring the furtherance of their interests. The other reason for
not wanting the Negro vote is that the respective traditions of the two
races are so essentially different.
"You see they (the Negroes) revere Lincoln, Sumner, Whittier, Lovejoy,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Grant, John Brown, etc. We have
no peculiar fondness for these characters. Jefferson Davis, R. E. Lee,
Stonewall Jackson, Pickett, Albert Sidney Johnson, etc., are the objects of
our love and enthusiasm. You see, it is quite natural that people having
such widely differing sentiments should in a measure live apart."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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