White Ladies

“ There are a very few instances where white women, who, are abandoned to all respect for the popular sense of propriety of their own sex and race, that have cohabited with black men; and also where giddy white girls have been decoyed into matrimonial alliances with them, through the illusion of a delusive feeling of romance ”

“ The white women of America are charming to look at-in the upper social classes. But even the Negro laundress, cook or elevator-girl far surpasses her mistress in the matter of feminine charms. No white woman has a color as beautiful as the dark browns, light-browns, peach-browns, or gold and bronze of the Negro girl. These are some of the things which make a walk through any Negro section of New York or Washington such a feast of delight. ”

“ No other women on earth could have emerged from the hell of force and temptation which once engulfed and still surrounds black women in America with half the modesty and womanliness that they retain. I have always felt like bowing myself before them in all abasement, searching to bring some tribute to these long-suffering victims, these burdened sisters of mine, whom the world, the wise, white world, loves to affront and ridicule and wantonly to insult. ”

“ Have you noticed in Washington—or anywhere in the South—that a negro is always seen with a girl at least one shade whiter than himself? The same instinct to rise, to get closer to the standard of the white man, whom they slavishly admire, is in the women as well as in the men. They are the weaker sex and must submit to Circumstance, but they would sacrifice the whole race for marriage with a white man. If you had left this girl to her fate, she would have gone to the devil, for a woman as white as that would have starved rather than marry a negro. ”

“ The very attempt to do this in the case of Negro Americans has strangely over-reached itself. By so much as the defective eyesight of the white world rejects black women as beauties, by so much the more it needs them as human beings,—an enviable alternative, as many a white woman knows. ”

“ To-day, the immigrants pouring in through the open gates of our seaport towns, the Indian when settled in severalty, the negro hardly emancipated from the degradation of two hundred years of slavery,—may all share in the sovereignty of the State. The white woman,—the woman in whose veins runs the blood of those heroic colonists who founded our country, of those women who helped to sustain the courage of their husbands in the Revolutionary War; the woman who may have given the flower of her youth and health in the service of our Civil War—that woman is excluded. ”

“ Indeed, the greater portion of the colored women, in the days of slavery, had no greater aspiration than that of becoming the finely-dressed mistress of some white man. Although freedom has brought about a new order of things, and our colored women are making rapid strides to rise above the dark scenes of the past, yet the want of protection to our people since the old-time whites have regained power, places a large number of the colored young women of the cities and towns at the mercy of bad colored men, or worse white men. ”

“ Did you never wonder whether he ever had loved at all?"
"You have made me wonder, to-night, whether, at some period of your life, you have not loved some woman of your own race and color. You must have had some opportunities of knowing white women."
"Very few. An' my pride was agin seekin' what I knew was not for me; for the woman I fancied to myself was no common white woman. White Rose, I carried a young man's heart in my bosom until I was near sixty, an' then I lost it." ”

“ Such strong, primitive types of Negro womanhood in America seem to some to exhaust its capabilities. They know less of a not more worthy, but a finer type of black woman wherein trembles all of that delicate sense of beauty and striving for self-realization, which is as characteristic of the Negro soul as is its quaint strength and sweet laughter. ”

“ Again and in more concrete ways the Negro woman has influenced America and that is by her personal contact with the family—its men, women and children. As housekeeper, maid and nurse—as confidante, adviser and friend, she was often an integral part of the white family life of the South, and transmitted her dialect, her mannerisms, her quaint philosophy and her boundless sympathy. ”

“ There is a soft, winning, captivating way about some of those girls that makes them perfectly resistible. I don't wonder at the envy, rage, and jealousy of our white women. They can't help being conscious of their own inferiority in these respects. ”

“ I wonder that white women are not afraid to meet a Negro, after reading in the papers every day about "that burly Negro brute." I have no hesitation in saying that the outrages that are alleged to be committed by colored men upon white women, bear no comparison to those which the whites commit with impunity upon colored women. ”

“ There are those who think they pay me a compliment in saying that I am just like a white woman. My aim, my joy, my pride is to sing the glories of my own people. Ours was the race that gave the world its measure of heroism, its standard of physical prowess. ”

“ The truth is, that in those days of witchcraft and apparitions of all kinds, and even in the present, among the ignorant and uneducated of the lower classes, any female seen at night in a lonely place, and supposed to be a spirit, was termed a white woman, no matter what the color of her dress may have been, provided it was not black. ”

“ We have noted then the Negro woman in America as a worker tending to emancipate all women workers; as a mother nursing the white race and uniting the black and white race; as a conspirator urging forward emancipation in various sorts of ways; and we have finally only to remember that to-day the women of America who are doing humble but on the whole the most effective work in the social uplift of the lowly, not so much by money as by personal contact, are the colored women. ”

“ In America the work of Negro women has not only pre-figured this development but it has had a direct influence upon it. The Negro woman as laborer, as seamstress, as servant and cook, has come into competition with the white male laborer and with the white woman worker. ”

“ Women careless in their household and slatternly in their dress grew more careful in the keeping of their homes and the arrangement of their attire. Women of the better class of their own race, coming among them awakened their self-respect. Prejudice and pride of race had separated them from their white neighbors and the more cultured of their race had shrunk from them in their ignorance, poverty and low social condition and they were left, in a great measure, to themselves—ostracised by the whites on the one side and socially isolated from the more cultured of their race on the other hand. ”

“ The Negro men are going to learn to protect their women from the snares [261] of white men, and their women are going to help them do this, too.... No longer does a Negro woman consider it an honor to have a white man for a ‘friend’—a lover; gradually have we made her understand that it is an insult, and she now tells her father, brother, or husband, as the case may be, and it is up to this man to defend the virtue of his female relative, in the same way the white man defends his. ”

“ When they saw that there was nothing to be done, they sent them about their business. "We know and we admire white and black women," said they, "but red women up to the present we have not heard them spoken of." ”

“ Our women have had to fight against indescribable odds in order to preserve their womanhood from the attacks of moral lepers, who, very often, were their masters and overseers. Yet, in spite of these well-known facts, we have produced women among [468] us of pure and good morals, with unimpeachable reputation for virtue and purity. Sometimes it is a little amusing to hear the white American expatiate on the immorality of Negro women. They certainly cannot forget their own record in their dealings with the helpless Negro women of this country. ”

“ In other years women's way was clear: to be beautiful, to be petted, to bear children. Such has been their theoretic destiny and if perchance they have been ugly, hurt, and barren, that has been forgotten with studied silence. In partial compensation for this narrowed destiny the white world has lavished its politeness on its womankind,—its chivalry and bows, its uncoverings and courtesies—all the accumulated homage disused for courts and kings and craving exercise. ”

“ The examples of valor and virtue on which their minds are fed are exclusively white examples. What wonder, then, that each generation comes to maturity with the idea imbedded in its mind that only white men are valorous and fit to rule and only white women are virtuous and entitled to chivalry, respect and protection? What wonder that they think, almost instinctively, that the Negro’s proper place, nationally and internationally, is that of an inferior? It is only what we should naturally expect. ”

“ So, I say, let the white women get busy and teach morality and respect to their own, and we shall see how that will work out. As for illegitimate children, the bearing of these is not confined to women of the Negro race by any means. The white infant asylums will give ample proof of this. We know full well that a white man may not marry a colored girl in the South, but we wonder just why it is he does not marry the white girl whom he seduces? ”

“ From this inevitable conclusion and consequence there is no possible escape. But the white women of the South are powerless to lift the morals of their men without lifting at the same time the morals of the women of the black race. ”

“ I allude to the extraordinary rarity of virtuous unions having taken place between the males and females of the pure Negroes and the pure Whites in America. I certainly have heard of such unions as in certain classes of society are seen in London; but in America, they were considered rather as very extraordinary occurrences, particularly if the male should be a pure negro, and the female a pure white. On the other hand, when the female is an African, lust, aided by fear or avarice, has often led to an illicit union between the sexes.... ”

“ There are in the institution several girls and women of color, and I asked the superintendent if the white inmates exhibited any prejudice against them on account of their color. To my surprise, the answer was that the contrary is the case. The whites look up to the colored girls, and seem either to have a respect for them or to be fascinated by them. This surprising statement was supplemented by another, that the influence of the colored girls on the whites is not good; the white girl who seeks the company of the colored girl deteriorates, and the colored girl does not change. ”

“ There, where no friendly feet but those of negroes and slaves had entered for months, the strengthening morning showed a young wife, almost white, and the most beautiful of her type, with comely features, and eyes and hair that the proudest white beauty might envy. ”

“ The curate of a large and fashionable church was endeavoring to teach the significance of white to a Sunday-school class.
"Why," said he, "does a bride invariably desire to be clothed in white at her marriage?"
As no one answered, he explained. "White," said he, "stands for joy, and the wedding-day is the most joyous occasion of a woman's life."
A small boy queried, "Why do the men all wear black?"—M.J. Moor.
Lilly May came to her mistress. "Ah would like a week's vacation, Miss Annie," she said, in her soft negro accent; "Ah wants to be married." ”

“ Take the girlhood of this same region, and it presents the same aspect, save that in large districts the white man has not forgotten the olden times of slavery and with indeed the deepest sentimental abhorrence of "amalgamation," still thinks that the black girl is to be perpetually the victim of his lust! In the larger towns and in cities our girls in common schools and academies are receiving superior culture. Of the 15,000 colored school teachers in the South, more than half are colored young women, educated since emancipation. ”

“ That very same pride, in fact, which impels the woman of the superior class to shrink with a horror, which seems to her instinctive, from any connection with the men of the inferior class, as a degradation from her own level, a sentiment: not regulated by color, but by condition, — since a white woman of refinement and education would just as soon think of marrying a negro as one of your newly-imported Irish clod-hoppers, even though he might be an Apollo in figure, and, when the dirt was washed off, a perfect Adonis in complexion ”

“ Hundreds of such cases might be cited, but enough have been given to prove the assertion that there are white women in the South who love the Afro-American's company even as there are white men notorious for their preference for Afro-American women. ”

“ When one considers how these women had spent the best part of their lives in working for the freedom of the negro, their humiliation can be imagined at seeing educated colored men laboring with might and main to prevent white women from obtaining the same privileges which they were asking for themselves. It was a bitter dose and one which women have been compelled to take in every State where a campaign for woman suffrage has been made. ”

“ I am able to give a partial reason—THE FORCE OF HABIT! The white man has grown so accustomed to seducing Negro women and getting by with it, that the virtue of his own women has come to mean nothing to him. ”