Black Growler

“ If the Negro in a community be lazy, indifferent, and careless about his farm, the white man in the community will soon fall into the same habit. On the other hand, if the white man is smart, industrious, energetic and persevering in his general makeup, the Negro will soon fall into line; so after all, whatever helps one race in the South will help the other and whatever degrades one race in the South, sooner or later will degrade the other. ”

“ If I did not believe the negro was capable of sufficient development to make him a responsible small farmer, I should not want to remain in the business that I am any longer, because [Pg 174] I believe that the development of my business is necessarily based upon the development of the negro and the cultivation of my lands. The negro possesses two remarkable qualifications: one is that he is imitative, and the other is that he has got pride; he wants to dress well ”

“ A negro arrested for stealing fowls had his arms bound behind him and a rope attached to one ankle, which was held by a policeman, while another kept close to the prisoner, beating him with his club, and as he darted forward to avoid a blow, the other would pull the rope, and the unfortunate accused would fall flat on his face. ”

“ As to the truth of an assertion, that is a point which never enters into negro consideration.
The two ringleaders of the proposed rebellion have been condemned at Black River, the one to be hanged, the other to transportation. The plot was discovered by the overseer of Lyndhurst Penn (a Frenchman from St. Domingo) observing an uncommon concourse of stranger negroes to a child’s funeral, on which occasion a hog was roasted by the father. He stole softly down to the feasting hut, and listened behind a hedge to the conversation of the supposed mourners ”

“ But the peaceful ox, playing truant, poor wretch, from his negro master, was full of tragedy, for the ox was white, and no solitary negro in the low-country, [Pg 157] where the forests are full of little negro graveyards, can bear the sight of anything white in the woods at night. The fear of ghosts is always with them, and a white cow, grazing in or near a graveyard, will often stampede a road full of worshipers returning from a prayer-meeting. ”

“ The third class is composed chiefly of the ante-bellum Negroes. They are well advanced in age and are contented with their present lot. Many of them have waited for years for the forty acres and mule and having been disappointed in their expectation, they have lost all hopes. They are fast losing sight on the things of this world and gaining sight on the things of the world to come. Ofttimes, they sing, “You may have all this world, but give me Jesus.” They are perfectly harmless and have no earthly ambition. This is what the white man here calls a good Negro ”

“ It therefore becomes easily understandable that the Black Bear mother can afford, without risk to her half-grown cubs, to breed every year in the open; while the grizzly does not, until her young are fully able to take care of themselves unaided, dare to associate with their possible enemies—the cantankerous males of the tribe. ”

“ There was a white man in Richland County, South Carolina, named Mr. Black, who made his living by hunting runaway slaves. I knew him as well as I did one of my fellow negroes on Col. Singleton's plantation. He was of dark complexion, short stature, spare built, with long, jet black, coarse hair. He bore the description of what some would call a good man, but he was quite the reverse; he was one of the most heartless men I have ever seen.
Mr. Black was a very successful hunter, although sometimes all of his bloodhounds were killed by runaway slaves, and he barely escaped with his life. ”

“ Black was the most cruel.
It was rumored that many of the runaway slaves that were never heard of afterward, were captured and killed in the woods by Mr. Black, but no special clue to this could be found. Finally Mr. Black was hired to capture a runaway slave in Barnwell County, S.C. This slave was with another, who was thought well of by his master, but hated by the overseer. In the chase, the two runaways separated, and the dogs followed the second instead of the one whom Mr. Black had been hired to hunt. Mr. Black had another hunter with him by the name of Motley. ”

“ No question is being asked by the American people more earnestly today than this one: “Lord, What shall this man, the Negro, do,—this black man upon whom centuries of ignorance have left their marks?” He has made a faithful slave, a courageous soldier, and when trained and educated, an industrious and law-abiding citizen, yet he is troubled on every side. What shall he do? Uneducated, undisciplined, untrained, he is often ferocious or dangerous; he makes a criminal of the lowest type for he is the product of ignorance. ”

“ For decades now, this charming old Negro has been held up to the children of the South as the perfect expression of the beauty of life in the glorious times "befo' de wah," when every Southern gentleman was suckled at the bosom of a "black mammy." Why should we not occasionally attempt to paint the Negro of the new day—intelligent, ambitious, thrifty, manly? Perhaps he is not so poetic; but certainly the human element is greater. ”

“ Later, a packet swooped down with smothered roar, and threw its electric search-light on the city wharf, revealing a crowd of negroes gathered there, like moths in the radiance of a candle; there were gay shouts, and a mad scampering—we could see it all, as plainly as if in ordinary light it had been but a third of the distance; and then the roustabouts struck up a weird song as they ran out the gang-plank, and, laden with boxes and bales, began swarming ashore, like a procession of black ants carrying pupa cases. ”

“ It is the low, degraded and depraved criminals of this class who stir up and incite race hatred, which always results in race riots. They do not attend church or any other religious meeting. The better class of Negroes are as anxious to get rid of these as the white man.
The second class is composed of the renters of farms, the owners of farms, of homes, of preachers, teachers, students, professional and business men. They believe that the Negro should be educated in the trades as well as in the professions ”

“ They are persecuted, despised, rejected, and discriminated against before every court in the South. Since the Negro is now being lynched as readily for his sins of omission as he is for his sins of commission, it is quite necessary for him when traveling in the South, to keep constantly in telegraphic communication with the agent at the station ahead as to the movement of the mob. In addition to this, the Negro is subjected to many other forms of persecution and discrimination in almost every walk of life. These things go to make up what we call the Negro problem. ”

“ Just as I have heard and seen in the barracones of Bozal negroes for sale, when, at the crack of the black negro-driver's whip, and not unfrequent application of the lash, the flagging gang of exhausted slavery has ever and again set up that chant of revelry, run mad, and danced that dance of desperation, which was to persuade the atrocious dealers in human flesh how sound of wind and limb they were, and the bystanders how happy. ”

“ Negroes do best when they have a share of the crop; the idea of working for themselves stimulates them. Planters are afraid to trust them to manage; but it’s a great mistake. I know an old negro who, with three children, made twenty-five bales of cotton this year on abandoned land. Another, with two women and a blind mule, made twenty-seven bales. A gang of fifty made three hundred bales,—all without any advice or assistance from white men. I was always in favor of educating and elevating the black race. ”

“ Seeing a swarm, or rather herd, of young negroes creeping and dancing about the door and yard of his mansion, all appearing healthy, happy and frolicsome and withal fat and decently clothed, both young and old, I felt induced to praise the economy under which they lived. 'Aye,' said he, 'I have many black people, but I have never bought nor sold any in my life. All that you see came to me with my estate by virtue of my father's will. They are all, old and young, true and faithful to my interests. They need no taskmaster, no overseer. ”

“ The man who works the soil must be taught how to farm. We have in this state nine purely agricultural schools, each of which is a white institution. It is true that some agricultural training is given for Negroes at Normal, Montgomery and Tuskegee, but these are not purely agricultural schools and the great mass of Negro farmers cannot hope to attend them.
If the Negro is to remain the farming class in the Black Belt of the South, then he must be taught at least the rudiments of the modern methods of improved farming. He must have agricultural schools and must be encouraged to attend them. ”

“ The bright sun and the lovely day delude the folk who know no better; these are the very things that lead to the starry night, and the quiet cold, and the white sheet over the grass at five a.m., and the black death following. The barren grower walks between his rows of wounded blossom; there is little harm to be seen at first, some of the petals are as fair as ever, others are just tipped with brown; and perhaps his wife runs up and says—“Oh, you need not be in a fright, my dear; why, they all look as well as ever.” ”

“ The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color-line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever the excuse for further discrimination. ”

“ Indeed, no white Southerner knows his own village so minutely as does any member of its colored population. The colored villagers see the whites off their guard and just as they are, and that is an attitude in which no one looks his best. The negroes might be called the black recording angels of the South. If what they know should be shouted aloud in any Southern town, its social life would disintegrate. Yet it is a strange fact that gossip seldom penetrates from the one race to the other.
So Peter Siner sat in the Jim Crow car musing over half a dozen villagers in Hooker's Bend. ”

“ When the crop is gathered, the master comes to see how much there is of it; he then gives the negro an order to sell that quantity; without that order, no storekeeper dare buy it. The slave lays out the money in something tidy to go to meeting in, and something to take to his wife.
The evidence of a black man, or of ever so many black men, stands for nothing against that of one white; in consequence of it the free negroes are liable to great cruelties. They have had their dwellings entered, their bedding and furniture destroyed, and themselves, their wives and children, beaten ”

“ Practically, all the land in the black belt of the South is cultivated by Negroes and the farm production has decreased so rapidly during the last ten or fifteen years that the average Negro farmer hardly makes sufficient to pay his rent and buy the few necessaries of life. ”

“ I have had to endure endless hardships during these twenty-five years, in order that thousands of poor negro youths might receive an industrial education,—boys and girls who might have gone into that demoralized class that is a disgrace to any people and that these friends may continue their interest in not only Snow Hill but all the schools of the South that are seeking to make better citizens of our people. ”

“ All candid or uncandid men will admit that the negro of the present day, have kinky heads, flat nose, thick lip and black skin, and which we have shown is not true of either Shem, Ham or Japheth's progeny of this day, and consequently it is impossible that either of them could be, or could have been, the progenitor of the negro, at or since the flood, for each race exists now, the one white and the other black ”

“ Every day for a week a man came in a boat to scatter corn in the rushes at a certain point along the bank of the Big River, and every day Blacky the Crow watched him and shook his black head and talked to himself and told himself that he didn't like it, and that he was sure that it was for no good purpose. ”

“ Generally speaking, the Negro problem consists of twelve millions of people of African descent living in this country, mostly in the Southern states, and forming one-third of the population of this section and one-eighth of the entire population of the United States. Notwithstanding the fact that we are far from an agreement as to the answer to this problem, we are all agreed that the solution must be sought in the answers to the following questions: What is to be the economic, the political, the civil, and the social status of the Negro in this country? ”

“ And what’s the next thing our young parson does? Why he tries to make us all feel pitiful for the black slaves, and leaves little pictures of negroes about, with the question printed below, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ just as if I was to be hail-fellow-well-met with every negro footman. They do say he takes no sugar in his tea, because he thinks he sees spots of blood in it. ”

“ When Waverley Carmichael, as a student in my summer class at Harvard, brought me one day a modest sheaf of his poems, I felt that in him a race had become or at least was becoming articulate. We have had, it is true, sympathetic portrayals of Negro life and feeling from without; we have had also the poems of Dunbar, significant of the high capabilities of the Negro as he advances far along the way of civilization and culture. ”

“ A large majority of the white men in the South believe that this problem is to be solved by the Negro “learning his place” and keeping in it. Though they do not say just what this place is, they purpose to teach it to the Negro by disfranchisement, by limiting his education, by discrimination on the streets and on the railroads, by barring him from public parks, public libraries, and public amusements of any kind, by insulting replies to courteous questions, by conviction for trivial offences, and, finally, by judge lynch and the shot gun. This class is called the rabble. ”