Brown people

“ Sir, the people of the Northern states are cowards; slavery has made cowards of them all. The whites are afraid of each other, and the blacks are afraid of the whites. You can effect nothing among such people,' he added, with decided emphasis. ”

“ They wished every means to be used to secure our success on the field, including Emancipation. But they would grow pale at the words Negro Equality; just as if the liberating of a race, and securing to them personal, political, social and religious rights, made it incumbent upon us to take these people into our houses, and give them seats in our social circle, beyond what we would accord to other total strangers. ”

“ Future generations will marvel at the calm forbearance, good sense, and Christian zeal of the American Negro of the nineteenth century.
Nothing has been left undone to cripple their energies, darken their minds, debase their moral sense, and obliterate all traces of their relationship to the rest of mankind; and yet how wonderfully they have sustained the mighty load of oppression under which they have groaned for thousands of years.
After looking at the past history of both races, I could easily see the cause of the great antipathy of the white man to the black, here in Tennessee. ”

“ The blacks felt their importance, saw their own power in national politics, were interviewed by obsequious and cringing white men from the North—men, many of them, far inferior, morally, to the negro. Two-faced, second-class white men of the South, few in number, it is true, hung like leeches upon the blacks. Among the latter was a respectable proportion of free men—free before the Rebellion; these were comparatively well educated; to these and to the better class of freedmen the country was to look for solid work. ”

“ The majority of the colored people in the Northern States descended from slaves: many of them were slaves themselves. In education, in morals, and in the development of mechanical genius, the free blacks of the Northern States will compare favorably with any laboring class in the world. And considering the fact that we have been shut out, by a cruel prejudice, from nearly all the mechanical branches, and all the professions, it is marvellous that we have attained the position we now occupy. ”

“ It is not difficult to understand the disgust of people in the North when in 1917 and 1918 Negro families rolled up in their thousands from the South—the real obscure, fuzzy-wuzzy, large-featured, smelly Negro of submerged Alabama. ”

“ The black man’s position as a servant, for many generations, has not only made the other races believe that is his legitimate sphere, but he himself feels more at home in a white apron and a towel on his arm, than with a quill behind his ear and a ledger before him. ”

“ The new race of Negro individualists arose. The old “mammies” and “uncles” were a people apart, and are dying out fast now. The new Negroes are with and for themselves. They make shift to be happy and to amuse themselves without the white man. ”

“ The older whites, brought up in the lap of luxury, educated to believe themselves superior to the race under them, self-willed, arrogant, determined, skilled in the use of side-arms, wealthy—possessing the entire political control of the State—feeling themselves superior also to the citizens of the free States,—this people was called upon to subjugate themselves to an ignorant, superstitious, and poverty-stricken, race—a race without homes, or the means of obtaining them ”

“ With all his fickleness, the Frenchman never forgets to find out and patronize one of his own people. Italians flock together and stand by each other, right or wrong. The Chinese are clannish, and stick by one another. The Caucasian race is the foremost in the world in everything that pertains to advanced civilization,—simply owing to the fact that an Englishman never passes the door of a countryman to patronize another race; and a Yankee is a Yankee all the days of his life, and will never desert his colors. But where is the Negro? ”

“ He is the bone and sinew of the south; he is the producer, while the master is nothing but a consumer, and a very poor consumer at that. The slave is the producer, and he alone can be relied upon. He has the sinew, the determination, and the will; and if you will take the free colored people of the south as the criterion, take their past history as a sample of what the colored people are capable of doing, every one must be satisfied that the slaves can take care of themselves. ”

“ It is impossible to suppose, in view of the usefulness of the black man in time of peace as a laborer in the South, and in time of war as a soldier at the North, and the growing respect for his rights among the people, and his increasing adaptation to a high state of civilization in this his native land, that there can ever come a time when he can be removed from this country without a terrible shock to its prosperity and peace. ”

“ For two hundred years the Southern whites lived a lazy life at the expense of the negro’s liberty. When the rebellion came, the blacks, trusted and true to the last, protected the families and homes of white men while they were away fighting the Government. The South is the black man’s home; yet if he cannot be protected in his rights he should leave. Where white men of liberal views can get no protection, the colored man must not look for it. Follow the example of other oppressed races, strike out for new territory. ”

“ The free colored people of the North, especially in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, were alive to their own interest, and were yearly holding conventions, at which they would recount their grievances, and press their claims to equal rights with their white fellow-citizens.
At these meetings, the talent exhibited, the able speeches made, and the strong appeals for justice which were sent forth, did very much to raise the blacks in the estimation of the whites generally, and gained for the Negroes’ cause additional friends. ”

“ With no wish to foster a spirit of lawlessness in this community, but actuated by a desire to see the negro keep in his proper place, we advise white men everywhere to stand up for their rights, and in no case yield an inch to the encroachment of an inferior race. ”

“ They said they could be trusted; and many people here at the north really believed that the slave did not want his liberty, would not have it if he could, and that the slave population was a very dangerous element against the north; but at once, on the approach of our soldiers, the slaves are seen, with their bundles and baskets, and hats and coats, and without bundles or baskets, and without hats or coats, rushing to our lines; demonstrating what we have so often said, that all the slave was waiting for was the opportunity to get his liberty. ”

“ Generations of oppression have done their work too thoroughly to have its traces wiped away in a dozen years. The race must be educated out of the ignorance in which it at present dwells, and lifted to a level with other races. Colored lawyers, doctors, artisans and mechanics, starve for patronage, while the negro is begging the white man to do his work. ”

“ The time for colored men and women to organize for self-improvement has arrived. Moral, social, and intellectual development, should be the main attainment of the negro race. Colored people have so long been in the habit of aping the whites, and often not the better class either, that I fear this characteristic in them, more than anything else. ”

“ That kind of talk will do very well for men who have comfortable homes out of the South, and law to protect them; but for the negro, with no home, no food, no work, the land-owner offering him conditions whereby he can do but little better than starve, such talk is nonsense. Fight out what? Hunger? Poverty? Cold? Starvation? Black men, emigrate.
CHAPTER XXIX. In America, the negro stands alone as a race. He is without mate or fellow in the great family of man. Whatever progress he makes, it must be mainly by his own efforts. ”

“ Civilization, or the social condition of man, is the result and test of the qualities of every race. The benefit of this blood mixture, the negro is never to enjoy on this continent. In the South where he is raised, in the North, East, or West, it is all the same, no new blood is to be infused into his sluggish veins. ”

“ But throughout all his intercourse with men of influence, he never lost sight of the condition of his race, and ever urged the emancipation and elevation of the slave. He well knew that every thing that was founded upon the admitted inferiority of natural right in the African was calculated to degrade him and bring him nearer to the foot of the oppressor, and he therefore never failed to allude to the equality of the races when with those whites whom he could influence. He always urged self-elevation upon the colored people whom he met. ”

“ While we had three or four trustworthy and faithful servants, it must be admitted that most of the negroes on “Poplar Farm” were always glad to shirk labor, and thought that to deceive the whites was a religious duty.
Wit and religion has ever been the negro’s forte while in slavery. Wit with which to please his master, or to soften his anger when displeased, and religion to enable him to endure punishment when inflicted. ”

“ The shrieks and agonies of the slave are heard in the markets at the seat of government, and within hearing of the American Congress, as well as on the cotton, sugar and rice plantations of the far South.
The history of the negroes in America is but a history of repeated injuries and acts of oppression committed upon them by the whites. It is not for ourselves that we make this appeal, but for those whom we have left behind.
In their Declaration of Independence, the Americans declare that "all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ”

“ When it is considered that they have mostly come out of bondage, and that their calling has been the lowest kind in every community, it is still more strange that the colored people have amassed so much wealth in every state in the Union. ”

“ History shows that of all races, the African was best adapted to be the “hewers of wood, and drawers of water.”
Sympathetic in his nature, thoughtless in his feelings, both alimentativeness and amativeness large, the negro is better adapted to follow than to lead. His wants easily supplied, generous to a fault, large fund of humor, brimful of music, he has ever been found the best and most accommodating of servants. The slave would often get rid of punishment by his wit; and even when being flogged, the master’s heart has been moved to pity, by the humorous appeals of his victim. ”

“ These poor people received no sympathy whatever, from the whites of the South. Indeed, the latter felt to rejoice, for the negro obtained his liberty through the Republican party, and the Freedmen’s Bank was a pet of that party.
The negro is an industrious creature, laziness is not his chief fault, and those who had left their work, returned to it. ”

“ All I demand for the black man is, that the white people shall take their heels off his neck, and let him have a chance to rise by his own efforts. ”

“ The Negro’s refrain, “Let My People Go,” continues to have a strong emotional appeal. Though devoted to the Southland in an intense, sentimental way, for the Negro has an infinitely pathetic love of home, he has come sorrowfully to the conclusion—he must go away from here. ”

“ Look at the Irish, Germans, French, Italians, and other races, who have come to this country, gone to the West, and are now enjoying the blessings of liberty and plenty; while the negro is discussing the question of whether he should leave the South or not, simply because he was born there.
While they are thus debating the subject, their old oppressors, seeing that the negro has touched the right chord, forbid his leaving the country. Georgia has made it a penal offence to invite the blacks to emigrate, and one negro is already in prison for wishing to better the condition of his fellows. ”

“ The negro will for pay perform any service under heaven, no matter how repulsive or full of hardship. He will sing his old plantation melodies and walk about the cotton fields in July and August, when the toughest white man seeks an awning. Heat is his 247 element. He fears no malaria in the rice swamps, where a white man’s life is not worth sixpence.
Then, I say, leave the South and starve the whites into a realization of justice and common sense. Remember that tyrants never relinquish their grasp upon their victims until they are forced to. ”

“ Bourgeois realists did “apprise white humanity of the better classes among Negro humanity,” but this is a value apart from the values of fiction. Their upper-class characters too often seem to serve as window-display. “Passing for white” is made a much more acute and frequent problem that it is in ordinary Negro middle class experience. With discerning satire, Martha Gruening sums up the argument of Negro bourgeois realism:
I am writing this book because most white people still believe that all Colored People are cooks called Mandy or Pullman porters called George—but they aren’t. ”

“ Although the first slaves, introduced into the American Colonies from the coast of Africa, were negroes of a very dark complexion with woolly hair, and it was thought that slavery would be confined to the blacks, yet the present slave population of America is far from being black. This change in colour, is attributable, solely to the unlimited power which the slave owner exercises over his victim. ”