Slavery by Another Name
Page 36
makeup is an imperious sexual impulse which, aroused at the
slightest incentive, sweeps aside al restraints in the pursuit of
physical gratification."7
The Montgomery Advertiser reported with obvious satisfaction on
a declaration of thanks issued by the "colored people of Richmond"
to a white education conference for al that it had done for African
Americans. While inviting at endees of the meeting to at end First
African Baptist Church while in the city, the declaration assured
whites, "The negroes of Richmond have always been able to live in
peace and harmony with the white race. The same kindly feeling
which coursed in the veins of the ‘mammy’ and body servant of
which coursed in the veins of the ‘mammy’ and body servant of
bygone days exists today"8 White southerners clung to any fragment
of such obeisance as demonstration that their racial conduct was a
corrective measure aimed at bringing African Americans back to
their natural posture toward whites—not an eruption of
supremacist venality.
A young white chambermaid at the English Hotel in Indianapolis,
Indiana, named Louise Hadley became a brief cause célèbre in May
1903, hailed in the North and the South, after she refused to make
up a bed that had been occupied by Booker T Washington. After
being red from her job, Hadley issued a public statement: "For a
white girl to clean up the rooms occupied by a negro … is a
disgrace," she wrote. "I have always felt that the negro was not far
above the brute." Commit ees formed in Georgia, Alabama, and
Texas raised several thousand dol ars in contributions to Hadley.
"We admire this young woman's discrimination and think she took
exactly the right action," beamed the Dadevil e Spot Cash.9
When Boston leaders publicly discussed a proposal to transport
large numbers of southern blacks to New England's declining farm
regions, southerners sput ered with skepticism. "We could wel
spare a few thousand ‘crap shooters’ and banjo pickers from the
South," one Alabama let er writer responded on the pages of the
Advertiser. "The only negroes who wil probably agree to go wil be
those with whom it would be a mercy not only for the whites, but
the negro of the South, to part," said the Chat anooga Times. "Since
the mulat o Crispus At ucks led the phlegmatic Bostonians in their
revolt against the British troops, dark skins have been popular up
there," sneered the Montgomery Advertiser. "Such a movement
might be good for the South. It would probably rid our section of a
good many negroes who are worse than useless here…It would give
those far-sighted philanthropists a chance to learn by actual contact
and experience something of the race problem about which they
prate so much." The Advertiser editorialized on the need for African
Americans to be "fixed" through hard labor.10
In the barely veiled racist invective of the day, the Columbus
In the barely veiled racist invective of the day, the Columbus
(Georgia) Enquirer-Sun said it doubted the movement would
amount to anything until watermelon season was over.11
The popular sentiments used to justify the violence appeared to
correspond with the work of a generation of American physicians
and scientists—in the North and the South—who busily translated
or mistranslated the elementary evolutionary principles outlined by
Darwin into crude explanations for why blacks should be returned
to a "mild form of slavery," as one delegate to a Virginia
constitutional convention phrased it. At a meeting of the state
medical association in Georgia, one physician presented a paper
that purported to document the close similarities between a long
list of black features—skin, mouth, lips, chin, hair, nose, nostrils,
ears, and navel—and those of the horse, cow, dog, and other
barnyard animals. From that claimed evidence, Dr. E. C. Ferguson
extrapolated that the "negro is monkey-like; has no sympathy for
his fel ow-man; has no regard for the truth, and when the truth
would answer his purpose the best, he wil lie. He is without
gratitude or appreciation of anything done for him; is a natural
born thief,—wil steal anything, no mat er how worthless. He has
no morals. Turpitude is his ideal of al that pertains to life. His
progeny are not provided for at home and are al owed to roam at
large without restraint, and seek subsistence as best they can,
growing up like any animal."12
The new science of anthropology embraced the notion that
quanti able characteristics of whites, blacks, and Indians—such as
brain size— demonstrated the clear physical and intel ectual
superiority of whites. In May 1903, as Warren Reese's Alabama
investigation got under way, the Atlantic Monthly magazine
published a long tract titled "The Mulat o Factor ," writ en by an
erudite planter in Greenvil e, Mississippi, Alfred H. Stone, arguing
that the presence of mixed-race blacks—with superior intel igence
and leadership skil s derived from traces of white blood—was the
cause of current race turmoil.
New exhibits on primitive peoples made the American Museum
New exhibits on primitive peoples made the American Museum
of Natural History in New York City a scienti c temple to the
inevitability of white dominion over nonwhite races. The institution
was emerging as a hotbed of the embryonic concepts of eugenics
and "racial hygiene" that would eventual y lead to unimaginable
violence later in the twentieth century.
The St. Louis World's Fair in 1904 featured an exhibit of live
pygmies, transported from the Belgian Congo—then reaching a
gruesome apogee of colonial slavery under King Leopold strikingly
similar to that emerging in the U.S. South. After the fair, one of the
pygmies, Ota Benga, appeared brie y as an exhibit at the Museum
of Natural History, before transferring to the monkey house at the
Bronx Zoological Park—initial y sharing a cage with an orangutan
named Bohong. After several years as a freak curiosity in the United
States, Benga kil ed himself in 1916.13
The same year that Benga appeared at Central Park West, the
Carnegie Institution funded the establishment of the Station for
Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The
center eventual y became the Eugenics Records O ce and the
leading scienti c advocate of notions of racial superiority and
inferiority. With broad support from the federal government,
prominent jurists, and scientists at major universities, researchers
there pursued a decades-long, but scienti cal y awed, project to
col ect data on the inherited characteristics of Americans. (For the
next four decades, the work of the Eugenics Records O ce and its
leaders was the backbone of a highly successful campaign to
promote sterilization for "feebleminded" and other ostensibly
inferior genetic stock, strict laws against racial intermarriage, and
stringent limits on the immigration of Jews and southern Europeans
to th
e United States.)
Amid that swel ing wave of public sentiment, shared by the
simplest and most advanced white Americans, the moral
implications of the Civil War faltered. More than thirty- ve years
had passed since the end of the con ict, long enough that the grief
and anger associated with individual deaths and disasters had
muted. Aging Union veterans of the Civil War were declining as a
muted. Aging Union veterans of the Civil War were declining as a
national voting bloc. In place of the war's fading emotional
resonance, a cult of reunion and reconciliation among whites in al
regions arose, embraced by leaders of al national parties who had
grown weary of the "bloody shirt"—a euphemism for demagogic
political tactics designed to stir regional emotions.
There was a palpable sense that northerners were no longer
wil ing to risk renewed violence to enforce a thinly supported
victor's justice on the South. Al demands for southern acquiescence
to guilt for the war were dissolving. A generation of post-Civil War
southerners—like Pace, McRee, and their contemporaries—were
approaching middle age. They were anxious to redeem their fathers
who fought and died in southern regiments and the skil of the
o cers who led them from the tarnish of defeat, the scandal of
treason, and the perceived amorality of slavery. Southerners—and
growing numbers of northern whites—gravitated to a new
interpretation of the rebel ion, one that abandoned any depiction of
the war as a defeated insurrection and instead permit ed open
reverence for southern "qualities" of bat le eld ferocity and social
chivalry, and for speci c acts of Confederate heroism to be
incorporated into col ective American history.
Georgia's federal judge Emory Speer, overseeing the new slavery
cases emerging in southern Georgia, summed up the new
conventional history in his 1903 commencement speech to
graduates of Atlanta's Emory University. Taking the life of Robert E.
Lee as his topic, Judge Speer cal ed for an explicit rehabilitation of
the once disgraced Confederate military commander. America, he
said, "can no longer a ord to question the military and personal
honor of Lee and his noble compatriots. America, with al her
acknowledged power, cannot fail to appropriate that warlike
renown, which gleamed on the bayonets and blazed in the serried
vol eys of the soldiers of the South."14
The South had nothing to be ashamed of anymore. The myth that
the war had been fought over regional patriotism rather than
slavery became rooted in American identity. Even slavery itself
came to be remembered not as one of the basal crimes of American
came to be remembered not as one of the basal crimes of American
society, but as a nearly benign anachronism. White Americans
arrived at a contradictory but rm view that slavery was a relic of
the past that had rightful y expired, but that coerced servitude and
behavior was nonetheless the appropriate role in national life for
blacks. Whites in the North and the South could be on the same
side in this perverse recasting of the war's narrative. That new
consensus unleashed typhonic waves across black life.
The blithe testimony of an elderly black man to a Georgia
legislative commission inquiring into nancial improprieties in that
state's convict leasing system il ustrated the gratuitous cynicism that
steeped the lives of African Americans. In June 1901, the man,
named Ephraim Gaither, was being held in a work camp for men
arrested and convicted of minor o enses at an isolated location
about fty miles north of Atlanta. Gaither had been arrested on a
dubious charge of carrying a concealed weapon. After conviction,
he was sold along with 105 other men to a timber-cut ing operation
control ed by one of Atlanta's most prominent businessmen, Joel
Hurt. That month, a sixteen-year-old boy arrived in the camp to
serve three months of hard labor for an unspeci ed misdemeanor
he had al egedly commit ed.
"He was around the yard sorter playing and he started walking of
and got to trot ing a lit le bit, playing around there and got behind
a pine tree," Gaither recounted calmly, in testimony to the
commit ee of Georgia elected o cials. "There was a young fel ow,
one of the bosses, up in a pine tree and he had his gun and shot at
the lit le negro and shot this side of his face o ," Gaither said as he
pointed to the left side of his face.
The fellow runs o to the woods about thirty or forty yards and the
guards follow him. Then Charley Goodson, he goes and gets the dog and
puts on the trail of him and they start off, the dogs are barking the way the
negro went o . Directly they came back and I heard one of the guards say
that negro he done and goes across the mountain and we can't get him.
That is when they come back with the dogs and everything was quiet. That
was on Thursday, Thursday evening. They let that negro stay there lying in
the woods from Thursday to Thursday and it gets to stinking so bad we
couldn't stand it hardly; and we complained about the smell. That day we
noticed a bitch, a hound bitch it was going across by the edge of the
woods with something in its mouth and we looked and seed that it was the
arm of that poor negro that they had killed down there in the woods. The
dog had torn the arm o of him and was dragging it down through the
edge of the woods with the ngers dragging on the ground. The Bosses
took John Williams and two or three others, I don't remember the names
now and made him a pine box and went down there and buried him.
Members of the commit ee responded by gril ing Gaither about
why he came to the state capitol that day to testify and whether a
black man's word could be trusted. "Did any white men see that?"
asked one state representative, about the events described by
Gaither. Another quizzed Gaither as to whether any white man in
Atlanta could vouch for him. Final y he was asked: "You were a bad
negro?"
Gaither responded: "No boss, I was no bad negro. They thought I
was." No queries were made as to the identities of the boy kil ed,
the camp boss who shot him, or why myriad state regulations
governing the treatment of prisoners at the time or the handling of
a convict's death were never ful l ed.15 The homicide Gaither
described was never investigated.
The harvest of that river of animosity was palpable for thousands of
African Americans. A venomous contempt for black life was not just
tolerated but increasingly celebrated. On Tybee Island o the coast
of Georgia, guards drove a squad of black men arrested by the local
sheri into the surf to bathe. Few could swim. Weighed down by
bal s and chains, four were swept into the sea. The body of
misdemeanant Charles Walker surfaced a day later on the edge of
nearby Screven Island.16
When a black man in Henderson, North Carolina, refused to give
up his reserved seat in a local theater to a white patron in April
1903, he was forcibly ejected
. When he resisted being removed, the
1903, he was forcibly ejected. When he resisted being removed, the
black man was shot dead by a policeman.17 White southerners
applauded broadly.
A white mob seized an African Methodist Episcopal minister in
Lees-burg, Georgia, named Rev. W W Wil iams that spring after he
began to emerge among local blacks in the farm community as an
in uential leader. White men owned nearly al the area's land and
were accustomed to the same conjugal rights with black women on
their farms as had existed during antebel um slavery. Rev. Wil iams
began preaching that black women should resist the sexual
advances of the dominant white men of the community, wrote Rev.
J. E. Sistrunk, in an account of the at ack sent to the Department of
Justice. "The mob …went upon him without warning and taken
him out of the parson aide [parsonage] …and strip[p]ed him
naked and one sat upon his h[e]ad and each by turns with a buggy
whip, whipped him until his back was raw from head to foot and
after whipping him they told him that they whipped him because
he was control ing colored women."18
Southerners particularly reveled at gruesome scenes of racial
violence that occurred outside their region, a rming the hypocrisy
of those Yankee critics who stil criticized racial conditions in the
former Confederacy. For weeks, carnage continued between blacks
and whites in Joplin, Missouri, and Wilmington, Delaware. In April,
a thirty-year-old black man named Thomas Gilyard was lynched in
Joplin, fol owed by the reported expulsion of every black in the
city19 In May, newspapers closely fol owed a "race war" in
Louisvil e, Kentucky20
Accounts of mortal clashes between whites and blacks, and the
raging mobs that often fol owed such incidents, lit ered the pages of
newspapers in the rst years of the century. "Race War in
Mississippi," the Advertiser screamed in May 1903, after blacks and
whites near the town of Laurel bat led over several days, leaving at
least one white farmer and "several negroes" dead. "The enraged
white men of the community are stil in the saddle searching for the
negro who instigated the trouble," the paper reported with dramatic
negro who instigated the trouble," the paper reported with dramatic
thril .21
The same month, whites in Indianapolis, Indiana, began meeting