reaches among a certain class of Southerners. In a letter to the Atlanta Constitution, November 5, 1906, a writer who signs himself Mark Johnson, says: The only use we have for the Negro is as a labourer. It is only as such that we need him; it is only as such that we can use him. If the North wants to take him and educate him we will bid him godspeed and contribute to his education if schools are located on the other side of the line. And here are extracts from a remarkable letter from a Southern white working man signing himself Forrest Pope and published in the Atlanta Georgian, October 22, 1906: When the skilled negro appears and begins to elbow the white man in the struggle for existence, don’t you know the white man rebels and won’t have it so? If you don’t it won’t take you long to find it out; just go out and ask a few of them, those who tell you the whole truth, and see what you will find out about it. What Is the Negro’s Place? All the genuine Southern people like the Negro as a servant, and so long as he remains the hewer of wood and carrier of water, and remains strictly in what we choose to call his place, everything is all right, but when ambition, [Pg 85]prompted by real education, causes the Negro to grow restless and he bestir himself to get out of that servile condition, then there is, or at least there will be, trouble, sure enough trouble, that all the great editors, parsons and philosophers can no more check than they can now state the whole truth and nothing but the truth, about this all-absorbing, far-reaching miserable race question. There are those among Southern editors and other public men who have been shouting into the ears of the North for twenty-five years that education would solve the Negro question; there is not an honest, fearless, thinking man in the South but who knows that to be a bare-faced lie. Take a young Negro of little more than ordinary intelligence, even, get hold of him in time, train him thoroughly as to books, and finish him up with a good industrial education, send him out into the South with ever so good intentions both on the part of his benefactor and himself, send him to take my work away from me and I will kill him. [Pg 85] COMPANION PICTURES Old and new cabins for Negro tenants on the Brown plantation The writer says in another part of this remarkable letter, giving as it does a glimpse of the bare bones of
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