Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South

Timothy Thomas Fortune

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• Publié par: irgio
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 41
• Langue: English

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Title: Black and White
Land, Labor, and Politics in the South
Author: Timothy Thomas Fortune
Release Date: October 7, 2005 [EBook #16810]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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BLACK AND WHITE
LAND, LABOR, and POLITICS in the SOUTH
By
TIMOTHY THOMAS FORTUNE
1884
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
In discussing the political and industrial problems of the South, I base my
conclusions upon a personal knowledge of the condition of classes in the
South, as well as upon the ample data furnished by writers who have pursued,
in their way, the question before me. That the colored people of the country will
yet achieve an honorable status in the national industries of thought and
activity, I believe, and try to make plain.
In discussion of the land and labor problem I but pursue the theories advocatedby more able and experienced men, in the attempt to show that the laboring
classes of any country pay all the taxes, in the last analysis, and that they are
systematically victimized by legislators, corporations and syndicates.
Wealth, unduly centralized, endangers the efficient workings of the machinery
of government. Land monopoly—in the hands of individuals, corporations or
syndicates—is at bottom the prime cause of the inequalities which obtain;
which desolate fertile acres turned over to vast ranches and into bonanza farms
of a thousand acres, where not one family finds a habitation, where muscle and
brain are supplanted by machinery, and the small farmer is swallowed up and
turned into a tenant or slave. While in large cities thousands upon thousands of
human beings are crowded into narrow quarters where vice festers, where
crime flourishes undeterred, and where death is the most welcome of all
visitors.
The primal purpose in publishing this work is to show that the social problems
in the South are, in the main, the same as those which afflict every civilized
country on the globe; and that the future conflict in that section will not be racial
or political in character, but between capital on the one hand and labor on the
other, with the odds largely in favor of nonproductive wealth because of the
undue advantage given the latter by the pernicious monopoly in land which
limits production and forces population disastrously upon subsistence. My
purpose is to show that poverty and misfortune make no invidious distinctions
of "race, color, or previous condition," but that wealth unduly centralized
oppresses all alike; therefore, that the labor elements of the whole United
States should sympathize with the same elements in the South, and in some
favorable contingency effect some unity of organization and action, which shall
subserve the common interest of the common class.
T. Thomas Fortune.
New York City, July 20, 1884.
CONTENTS
I. Black 1
II. White 6
III. The Negro and the Nation 13
IV. The Triumph of the Vanquished 19
V. Illiteracy—Its Causes 28
VI. Education—Professional or Industrial 38
VII. How Not to Do It 55
VIII. The Nation Surrenders 62
IX. Political Independence of the Negro 67
X. Solution of the Political Problem 79
XI. Land and Labor 89
XII. Civilization Degrades the Masses 96
XIII. Conditions of Labor in the South 107
XIV. Classes in the South 120
XV. The Land Problem 133
XVI. Conclusion 145
Appendix 151On a summer day, when the great heat induced a general thirst, a Lion and a
Boar came at the same moment to a small well to drink. They fiercely disputed
which of them should drink first, and were soon engaged in the agonies of a
mortal combat. On their suddenly stopping to take breath for the fiercer renewal
of the strife, they saw some vultures in the distance, waiting to feast on the one
which should fall. They at once made up their quarrel, saying, "It is better for us
to be friends, than to become the food of crows or vultures."—Æsop's Fables.
CHAPTER I
Black
Return to Table of Contents
There is no question to-day in American politics more unsettled than the negro
question; nor has there been a time since the adoption of the Federal
Constitution when this question has not, in one shape or another, been a
disturbing element, a deep-rooted cancer, upon the body of our society,
frequently occupying public attention to the exclusion of all other questions. It
appears to possess, as no other question, the elements of perennial vitality.
The introduction of African slaves into the colony of Virginia in August, 1619,
was the beginning of an agitation, a problem, the solution of which no man,
even at this late date, can predict, although many wise men have prophesied.
History—the record of human error, cruelty and misdirected zeal—furnishes no
more striking anomaly than the British Puritan fleeing from princely rule and
tyranny and dragging at his heels the African savage, bound in servile chains;
praying to a just God for freedom, and at the same time riveting upon his fellow-
man the gyves of most unjust and cruel slavery. A parallel for such hypocrisy,
such sacrilegious invocation, is not matched in the various history of peoples.
It did not matter to the early settlers of the American colonies that, in the
memorable struggle for the right to be represented if taxed, a black man—
Crispus Attucks, a full-blooded Negro—died upon the soil of Massachusetts, in
the Boston massacre of 1770, in common with other loyal, earnest men, as the
[Pg 2]first armed protest against an odious tyranny; it did not matter that in the armies
of the colonies, in rebellion against Great Britain, there were (according to the
report of Adjutant General Scammell), on the 24th day of August, 1778, 755
regularly enlisted negro troops; it did not matter that in the second war with
Great Britain, General Andrew Jackson, on the 21st day of September, 1814,
appealed to the "free colored people of Louisiana" as "sons of freedom," who
were "called upon to defend our most inestimable blessing," the right to be free
and sovereign, and to "rally around the standard of the eagle, to defend all
which is dear in existence;" it did not matter that in each of these memorable
struggles the black man was called upon, and responded nobly, to the call for
volunteers to drive out the minions of the British tyrant. When the smoke of
battle had dissolved into thin air; when the precious right to be free and
sovereign had been stubbornly fought for and reluctantly conceded; when the
bloody memories of Yorktown and New Orleans had passed into glorious
history, the black man, who had assisted by his courage to establish the free
and independent States of America, was doomed to sweat and groan that
others might revel in idleness and luxury. Allured, in each instance, into the
conflict for National independence by the hope held out of generous rewardand an honest consideration of his manhood rights, he received as his portion
chains and contempt. The spirit of injustice, inborn in the Caucasian nature,
asserted itself in each instance. Selfishness and greed rode roughshod over
the promptings of a generous, humane, Christian nature, as they have always
done in this country, not only in the case of the African but of the Indian as well,
each of whom has in turn felt the pernicious influence of that heartless greed
which overleaps honesty and fair play, in the unmanly grasp after perishable
gain.
The books which have been written in this country—the books which have
molded and controlled intelligent public opinion—during the past one hundred
and fifty years have been written by white men, in justification of the white
[Pg 3]man's domineering selfishness, cruelty and tyranny. Beginning with Thomas
Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, down to the present time, the same key has been
struck, the same song as been sung, with here and there a rare exception—as
in the case of Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Judge Tourgée's A Fool's
Errand, Dr. Haygood's Our Brother in Black, and some others of less note. The
white man's story has been told over and over again, until the reader actually
tires of the monotonous repetition, so like the ten-cent novels in which the white
hunter always triumphs over the red man. The honest reader has longed in vain
for a glimpse at the other side of the picture so studiously turned to the wall.
Even in books written expressly to picture the black man's side of the story, the
author has been compelled to palliate, by interjecting extenuating, often
irrelevant circumstances, the ferocity and insatiate lust of greed of his race. He
has been unable to tell the story as it was, because his nature, his love of race,
his inborn, prejudices and narrowness made him a lurking coward.
And so it has been with the newspapers, which have ever been th