"Since the dawn of history the Negro has owned the continent of Africa rich beyond the poet's fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a White man showed him its light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never built a harness, cart or sled.
A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber, he never carved a block, sawed a foot of lumber or built a house save of broken sticks and mud.
With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for 4,000 years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizons calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed of a sail. He lived as his fathers lived - stole his food, worked his wife, sold his children, ate his brother, content to drink, sing, to dance, and sport as the ape.
And this creature, half child, half animal, the creature of impulse, whim and conceit, pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw; a being who left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger - they have set this thing to rule over the Southern people ... Merciful God ... it surpasses human belief." - Thomas Dixon, Jr.
From The leopard's Spots - 1902:
CHAPTER XIV
THE NEGRO UPRISING
THE summer of 1867! Will ever a Southern man or woman who saw it forget its scenes? A group of oath-bound secret societies, The Union League, The Heroes of America, and The Red Strings dominating society, and marauding bands of negroes armed to the teeth terrorising the country, stealing, burning and murdering.
Labour was not only demoralised, it had ceased to exist. Depression was universal, farming paralysed, investments dead, and all property insecure. Moral obligations were dropping away from conduct, and a gulf as deep as hell and high as heaven opening between the two races.
The negro preachers openly instructed their flocks to take what they needed from their white neighbours. If any man dared prosecute a thief, the answer was a burned barn or a home in ashes.
The wildest passions held riot at Washington. The Congress of the United States as a deliberative body under constitutional forms of government no longer existed. The Speaker of the House shook his fist at the President and threatened openly to hang him, and he was arraigned for impeachment for daring to exercise the constitutional functions of his office!
The division agents of the Freedman's Bureau in the South sent to Washington the most alarming reports, declaring a famine imminent. In reply the vindictive leaders levied a tax of fifteen dollars a bale on cotton, plunging thousands of Southern farmers into immediate bankruptcy and giving to India and Egypt the mastery of the cotton markets of the world!
Congress became to the desolate South what Attila, the "Scourge of God" was to civilised Europe.
Sound familiar? Only it's not just the South, but the entire country. What to do..what to do?
