Saturday, October 23, 2021

Some Excerpts from Thomas Adams Upchurch, Legislating Racism (2004)

  

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)