“ The North, victorious, forgot; but the South, broken and defeated, remembered. Until I had been a good while in the South and talked with many people I had no idea what a social cataclysm like the Civil War really meant to those who are defeated, how long it echoes in the hearts of men and women. The Negro has indeed suffered—suffered on his way upward; but the white man, with his higher cultivation, his keener sensibilities, his memories of a departed glory, has suffered far more. ”

“ Whether we like it or not the whole nation (indeed, the whole world) is tied by unbreakable bonds to its Negroes, its Chinamen, its slum-dwellers, its thieves, its murderers, its prostitutes. We cannot elevate ourselves by driving them back either with hatred or violence or neglect; but only by bringing them forward: by service.
For good comes to men, not as they work alone, but as they work together with that sympathy and understanding which is the only true Democracy. The Great Teacher never preached the flat equality of men, social or otherwise. ”

“ When the South got on its feet again after Reconstruction and took account of itself, what did it find? It found 4,000,000 ignorant Negroes changed in name from “slave” to “freeman,” but not changed in nature. It found the poor whites still poor whites; and the aristocrats, although they had lost both property and position, were still aristocrats. For values, after all, are not outward, but inward: not material, but spiritual. It was as impossible for the Negro at that time to be less than a slave as it was for the aristocrat to be less than an aristocrat. ”

“ There can be no greater wrong done the people of any community than for public sentiment to permit and tolerate this growing and destructive crime of miscegenation, yet in many towns and cities of Louisiana, especially, there are to-day white men cohabiting with Negro women, who have sweet and lovable families. This is a crime that becomes almost unbearable, and should bring the blush of shame to every man’s cheek who dares to flaunt his debased and degrading conceptions of morality in the eyes of self-respecting men and women. ”

“ Colour prejudice is used like any other weapon for strengthening the monopoly of the labour union. I know several unions which are practically monopolistic corporations into which any outsider, white, yellow, or black, penetrates with the greatest difficulty. Such closely organised unions keep the Negroes out in the South exactly as they do in the North. A Negro tile-setter, steam-fitter or plumber can no more get into a union in Atlanta than in New York. Of course these unions, like any other closely organised group of men, employ every weapon to further their cause. ”

“ But the unfortunate result of the dominance of the single idea of the Negro upon politics has been to benumb the South intellectually; to stifle free thought and free speech. Let a man advance a new issue and if the party leaders do not favour it they have only to cry out “Negro,” twisting the issue so as to emphasise its Negro side (and every question in the South has a Negro side) , and the independent thinker is crushed. I once talked with the editor of a newspaper in the South who said to me, “such and such is my belief.” ”

“ We are learning that no race can occupy a soil unless it gets as much out of it as any other race gets out of it. Soil, sunshine, rain, and the laws of trade have no regard for race or colour. We are learning that we must be builders if we would succeed. As we learn this lesson we shall find help at the South and at the North. We must not be content to be tolerated in communities, we must make ourselves needed. The law that governs the universe knows no race or colour. The force of nature will respond as readily to the hand of the Chinaman, the Italian, or the Negro as to any other race. ”

“ I heard it over and over again, not only in Huntsville but, in substance, everywhere that I stopped in the South:
“If we convict these men for lynching the Negro, Maples, we shall establish a precedent that will prevent us from lynching for the crime of rape.”
Every argument on lynching in the South gets back sooner or later to this question of rape. Ask any high-class citizen—the very highest—if he believes in lynching, and he will tell you roundly, “No.” Ask him about lynching for rape, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he will instantly weaken. ”

“ I tried to see as much as I could of this “worthless Negro,” who is about the lowest stratum of humanity, it seems to me, of any in our American life. He is usually densely ignorant, often a wanderer, working to-day with a railroad gang, to-morrow on some city works, the next day picking cotton. He has lost his white friends—his “white folks,” as he calls them—and he has not attained the training or self-direction to stand alone. He works only when he is hungry, and he is as much a criminal as he dares to be. ”

“ In short, the Negro in times past has never been in politics in the South in any positive sense. And that is not in the least surprising. Coming out of slavery, the Negro had no power of intelligent self-direction, practically no leaders who knew anything. He was still a slave in everything except name, and slaves have never yet ruled, or helped rule.
The XV Amendment to the Constitution could not really enfranchise the Negro slaves. Men must enfranchise themselves.
And this political equality by decree, not by growth and development, caused many of the woes of Reconstruction. ”

“ How shrewdly the labour union, whether in San Francisco or Atlanta, seizes upon that race hatred to keep the black or yellow man out of the union and thereby control all the work for its members! Race prejudice played upon becomes a tool in clinching the power of the labour monopoly.
How the politician in the South excites race hatred in order that he may be elected to office! Vardaman governed because he could make men hate one another more bitterly than his opponent. The Rev. Thomas Dixon has appealed in his books and plays to the same passion. ”

“ If you were to tell these men that the Negroes of Springfield are disfranchised as absolutely as they are anywhere in the South, they would stare at you in amazement. But a purchased voter is a disfranchised voter. The Negroes have no more real voice in the government of Springfield than they have in the government of Savannah or New Orleans. In the South the Negro has been disfranchised by law or by intimidation: in the North by cash. ”

“ Once permit the shackles of law and order to be cast off, and men, white or black, Christian or pagan, revert to primordial savagery. There is no such thing as an orderly mob.
Crime had been committed by Negroes, but this mob made no attempt to find the criminals: it expressed its blind, unreasoning, uncontrolled race hatred by attacking every man, woman, or boy it saw who had a black face. A lame boot-black, an inoffensive, industrious Negro boy, at that moment actually at work shining a man’s shoes, was dragged out and cuffed, kicked and beaten to death in the street. ”

“ The man who joins a mob, by his very acts, puts himself on a level with the Negro criminal: both have given way wholly to brute passion. For, if civilisation means anything, it means self-restraint; casting away self-restraint the white man becomes as savage as the criminal Negro.
If the white man sets an example of non-obedience to law, of non-enforcement of law, and of unequal justice, what can be expected of the Negro? A criminal father is a poor preacher of homilies to a wayward son. ”

“ Any discrimination based simply on race or colour is barbarous, we care not how hallowed it be by custom, expediency, or prejudice. Differences made on account of ignorance, immorality, or disease are legitimate methods of fighting evil, and against them we have no word of protest, but discriminations based simply and solely on physical peculiarities, place of birth, colour of skin, are relics of that unreasoning human savagery of which the world is, and ought to be, thoroughly ashamed. ”

“ It was in many ways a charming aristocracy, but it was doomed from the beginning. If there had been no North, slavery in the South would have disappeared just as inevitably. It was the restless yeast of democracy, spreading abroad upon the earth (in Europe as well as America) that killed slavery and liberated both Negro and poor white men.
[Pg 235] Revolutions such as the Civil War change names: they do not at once change human relationships. Mankind is reconstructed not by proclamations or legislation or military occupation, but by time, growth, education, religion, thought. ”

“ One of the most significant things I saw in the South—and I saw it everywhere—was the way in which the white people were torn between their feeling of race prejudice and their downright economic needs. Hating and fearing the Negro as a race (though often loving individual Negroes) , they yet want him to work for them; they can’t get along without him. In one impulse a community will rise to mob Negroes or to drive them out of the country because of Negro crime or Negro vagrancy, or because the Negro is becoming educated, acquiring property and “getting out of his place” ”

“ Young men, who were not afraid, had to grow up to the task of reconstruction. And no one who has not traced the history of the South since the war can form any conception of the magnitude of that task. It was essentially the building of a new civilisation. The leaders were compelled not only to face abject poverty, but they have had to deal constantly with the problem of a labouring class just released from slavery. At every turn, in politics, in industry, in education, they were confronted with the Negro and the problem of what to do with him. ”