People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [124]
Perhaps Washington saw this as a necessary tactic of survival in a time of hangings and burnings of Negroes throughout the South. It was a low point for black people in America. Thomas Fortune, a young black editor of the New York Globe, testified before a Senate committee in 1883 about the situation of the Negro in the United States. He spoke of “widespread poverty,” of government betrayal, of desperate Negro attempts to educate themselves.
The average wage of Negro farm laborers in the South was about fifty cents a day, Fortune said. He was usually paid in “orders,” not money, which he could use only at a store controlled by the planter, “a system of fraud.” The Negro farmer, to get the wherewithal to plant his crop, had to promise it to the store, and when everything was added up at the end of the year he was in debt, so his crop was constantly owed to someone, and he was tied to the land, with the records kept by the planter and storekeeper so that the Negroes “are swindled and kept forever in debt.” As for supposed laziness, “I am surprised that a larger number of them do not go to fishing, hunting, and loafing.”
Fortune spoke of “the penitentiary system of the South, with its infamous chain-gang. . . . the object being to terrorize the blacks and furnish victims for contractors, who purchase the labor of these wretches from the State for a song. . . . The white man who shoots a negro always goes free, while the negro who steals a hog is sent to the chaingang for ten years.”
Many Negroes fled. About six thousand black people left Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi and migrated to Kansas to escape violence and poverty. Frederick Douglass and some other leaders thought this was a wrong tactic, but migrants rejected such advice. “We have found no leader to trust but God overhead of us,” one said. Henry Adams, another black migrant, illiterate, a veteran of the Union army, told a Senate committee in 1880 why he left Shreveport, Louisiana: “We seed that the whole South—every state in the South—had got into the hands of the very men that held us slaves.”
Even in the worst periods, southern Negroes continued to meet, to organize in self-defense. Herbert Aptheker reprints thirteen documents of meetings, petitions, and appeals of Negroes in the 1880s—in Baltimore, Louisiana, the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Kansas—showing the spirit of defiance and resistance of blacks all over the South. This, in the face of over a hundred lynchings a year by this time.
Despite the apparent hopelessness of this situation, there were black leaders who thought Booker T. Washington wrong in advocating caution and moderation. John Hope, a young black man in Georgia, who heard Washington’s Cotton Exposition speech, told students at a Negro college in Nashville, Tennessee:
If we are not striving for equality, in heaven’s name for what are we living? I regard it as cowardly and dishonest for any of our colored men to tell white people or colored people that we are not struggling for equality. . . . Yes, my friends, I want equality. Nothing less. . . . Now catch your breath, for I am going to use an adjective: I am going to say we demand social equality. . . . I am no wild beast, nor am I an unclean thing.
Rise, Brothers! Come let us possess this land.