Representative
Charles E. Hooker of Mississippi contended, very seriously, as did many other
Americans, that God had ordained African slavery in the United States because
He wanted to civilize and Christianize a portion of the race in order to send
them back to Africa someday to evangelize the gigantic, pagan contingent.
Hooker thus favored emigration and believed fully that there would come a time
in the not-too-distant future when God would lead his chosen people out of the
land of their captivity back to their ancestral homeland. In the meantime, he
thought it paramount that whites instill them with education and morality to prepare
them for the work ahead. He named Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who had only
later become recognized as a leader of the black race in America, as the
probable “Moses” of the emigrants. Hooker’s ideas, to some extent, proved
prophetic. Indeed, Turner did become the most vociferous and visible leader of
the emigration movement throughout the 1890s. (Thomas Adams Upchurch, Legislating
Racism: The Billion Dollar Congress and the Birth of Jim Crow [Lexington, Ky.:
The University of Kentucky Press, 2004], 36)
The main argument for
racial segregation was that it was natural and instinctive for races to
associate with their own kind. Hence, mixing the races broke the rules of
nature. Southerners and northerners alike argued that not only did the supposed
superior race recognize this natural order, but the inferior races recognized
it as well. Senator John Tyler Morgan of Alabama explained that “It is as instinctive
with the negro to admit” this natural order “as it is with the white race to
demand and assert it. . . . Race separation is the only cure for race aversion”.
Senator Edward Cary Walthall of Mississippi concurred, saying segregation “is a
reciprocal arrangement, is absolutely just, is supported by public sentiment
and enforced by the courts.” For proof that blacks not only accepted but
actually preferred segregation, he quoted L. W. Moore, a black representative
in the Mississippi legislature from Bolivar County, who said publicly that it
would keep “the average negro in Mississippi . . . reasonably content with his
condition.” It was just this propensity of blacks to commune among themselves
by choice, declared Walthall, that caused white southerners to need a “solid
South,” because whenever “whites would divide upon reason . . . blacks would
unite upon race.”
While Virginian
Philip A. Bruce believed that blacks had an “independent tendency,” just like
whites. That is, given the choice, they would congregate and “live apart” from
whites. Doing so ostensibly gave blacks freedom to develop and practice their
own unique culture. He cited black churches as the prime example. They had
developed their own form of worship, a form not contrary to white religion but
unique nonetheless. When left alone to worship as they pleased, without fear of
mockery or persecution from whites, black Christians, concluded Bruce, were happy.
Many other white
southerners likewise truly believed that blacks preferred segregation to
conflict. Before he died, Henry Woodfin Grady convinced the whole staff of the Atlanta
Constitution that segregation was the most sensible solution to the race
problem. Once Grady was gone, the paper reported every instance thereafter when
blacks did anything separate from whites. It reported, for example, about a
black veterans’ parade in Georgia held on January 1, 1890, to celebrate the
Emancipation Proclamation and a black state fair held in South Carolina, to
white whites were not invited. Were not such actions proof that blacks
preferred to be separate from whites, asked the Constitution?
Missing from such
reports of wishful-thinking whites were examples of other black meetings
refuting the argument that blacks preferred segregation. The National Convention
of Colored Americans, for instance, which met in Washington, D.C., in January
1890, protested to the federal government for the Interstate Commerce Commission
laws to be strengthened to prevent segregation on trains. John Edward Bruce, a
black journalist, speaking at the Inaugural Afro-American League Convention in
Chicago resented the white arrogance that created racial segregation. He
considered white Americans in general “modern barbarians” who flattered
themselves with false notions of their automatic superiority based upon their
whiteness.
Yet the argument that
blacks preferred segregation gained popularity through repeated usage by whites
and by the fact that most whites misconstrued the statements of black leaders
on the subject. Black North Carolinian J.C. Price, for instance, stated unequivocally
that blacks did not aspire to social equality with whites—they merely asked for
their constitutionally protected political rights. “One is a question of law,”
said Price, “and the other is a matter of choice.” To put his argument in
perspective, he contrasted the situations of “poor white trash” and black
American, saying: “Prior to the war a poor white man was as much a social
pariah as a free colored man. The aristocracy took no notice of hum as a social
equal. . . . Since the war there has been little diminution of this feeling. .
. .[yet] This class of white men have all their civil and political rights, but
no one asserts that they are trying to force themselves into social equality.”
A. J. Reed of the League of Colored Republicans in Baltimore tried to explain
the difference between political rights and social equality by declaring, “We
don’t want . . . to marry your daughters, but we can every right to which we
are entitled under the constitution, and for that we mean to fight. They tell
us that if this movement succeeds, that one may walk up the street and see standing
in front of some big establishment, a big, buck nigger in a policeman’s
uniform. I tell you the colored man aims higher in light than that . . . [but]
any man who says that the colored race is for social equality is either densely
ignorant or a rascal.” Such explanations notwithstanding, most white Americans
could not make the distinction in 1890 between political rights and social equality.
Consequently, when they heard black leaders renounce any claims to social
equality, they construed that African Americans wanted separation and that they
were content with the racial status quo. (Thomas Adams Upchurch, Legislating
Racism: The Billion Dollar Congress and the Birth of Jim Crow [Lexington, Ky.:
The University of Kentucky Press, 2004], 204-6, emphasis in bold added)
