wrought up against them. But the Negro, owing to his ignorance, and also to his affection for the land of his birth, and on account of a peculiar provincialism that narrowed his scope of 36 vision of the world and its opportunities, could not bring himself to leave the South, so far as the great mass was concerned. Then, too, he had been told that the Yankees would not treat him like the Southerner, and Southern newspapers took especial pains to publish full details of all the lynchings that occurred in the North and make suggestive comments on them, in which they endeavored to show that the whole country was down on the Negro, and that while in the South the whites lynched only the one Negro against whom they had become enraged, in the North they mobbed and sought to drive out all the Negroes in the community where the crime had been committed. (The two clippings below occurred in the same issue of a Southern paper and showed how, while the North was mobbing a Negro, the South was honoring one.)4 37

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“Instances of white mechanics North who were refusing to work with Negroes, and instances of Northern hotels refusing them shelter were also 38 made the most of and served the purpose of deterring Negro emigration from the Southern States. Frequently some Negro was brought home dead, 39 or one who had contracted disease in the North came home and died. These occurrences were also used as object lessons and had their effect.

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“In fact, the Southern white people did not want the Negroes to leave. They wanted them as domestics, on the farm, and as mechanics. They knew their value as such. ‘Be as intelligent, as capable as you may but acknowledge my superiority,’ was the unspoken command.

“Many individual Negroes acted on this suggestion and by shrewd foresight managed to accumulate 40 considerable property, and so long as they ‘minded their own business,’ and ‘stayed out of politics’ they did well, and had strong personal friends among the white people. Their property rights were recognized to a very large extent, in fact the right of Negroes to hold property was very generally conceded. This was true even to the extent, in several instances, of causing reimbursement for those who were run away from their homes by mobs. In some states laws were passed giving damages to the widows of those who were lynched by mobs, said damages to be paid by the county in which the lynching occurred. In fact the South had long 

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