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THE NEGRO: THE SOUTHERNER’S PROBLEM

CHAPTER I SLAVERY AND THE OLD RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUTHERN WHITES AND BLACKS

SLAVERY AND THE OLD RELATION BETWEEN THE SOUTHERN WHITES AND BLACKS

I

Among the chief problems which have vexed the country for the last century and threaten to give yet more trouble in the future, is what is usually termed “The Negro Question.” To the South, it has been for nearly forty years the chief public question, overshadowing all others, and withdrawing her from due participation in the direction and benefit of the National Government. It has kept alive sectional feeling; has inflamed partisanship; distorted party policies; barred complete reconciliation; cost hundreds of millions[Pg 4] of money, and hundreds if not thousands of lives, and stands ever ready, like Banquo’s ghost, to burst forth even at the feast.

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For the last few years it has appeared to be in process of being settled, and settled along the lines which the more conservative element of the white race at the South has deemed for the permanent good of both races, a view in which the best informed element at the North apparently acquiesced. The States which the greater part of the most ignorant element of the Negro race inhabited had substantially eliminated this element from the participation in political government, but had provided qualifications for suffrage which would admit to participation therein any element of the race sufficiently educated to meet what might to an impartial man appear a reasonable requirement.[1] Meantime, the whites were taxing themselves heavily and were doing all in their power to give the entire race the education which would enable them to meet this requirement.

Those whites who know the race best and hold the most far-reaching conception of the subject maintain that this disfranchisement was[Pg 5] necessary, and, even of the Negro race, those who are wisest and hold the highest ideal for their people acquiesced in this—at least, to the extent of recognizing that the Negroes at large needed a more substantial foundation for full citizenship than they had yet attained—and were preaching and 

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