African Americans in the South in the Late Nineteenth Century, 1875-1900
14–1 A Sharecrop Contract, 1882
During the Reconstruction era, sharecropping emerged as the most common method of organizing and financing
southern agriculture. Large plantations, no longer worked by gangs of slaves, were broken up into small plots worked
by individual families. The following contract typifies the sort of formal arrangements that many thousands of poor
black and white farmers made with local landowners.
SOURCE: Grimes Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in Robert
D. Marcus and David Burner, eds., America Firsthand (1992), pp. 306—308.
To every one applying to rent land upon shares, the following conditions must be read, and agreed to.
To every 30 or 35 acres, I agree to furnish the team, plow, and farming implements, except
cotton planters, and I do not agree to furnish a cart to every cropper. The croppers are to have half of
the cotton, corn and fodder (and peas and pumpkins and potatoes if any are planted) if the following
conditions are compiled with, but—if not—they are to have only two fifths (2/5). Croppers are to
have no part or interest in the cotton seed raised from the crop planted and worked by them. No
vine crops of any description, that is, no watermelons, muskmelons,…squashes or anything of that
kind, except peas and pumpkins, and potatoes, are to be planted in the cotton or corn. All must
work under my direction. All plantation work to be done by the croppers. My part of the crop to be
housed by them, and the fodder and oats to be hauled and put in the house. All the cotton must be
topped about 1st August. If any cropper fails from any cause to save all the fodder from his crop, I
am to have enough fodder to make it equal to one half of the whole if the whole amount of fodder
had been saved.
For every mule or horse furnished by me there must be 1000 good sized rails…hauled, and the
fence repaired as far as they will go, the fence to be torn down and put up from the bottom if I so
direct. All croppers to haul rails and work on fence whenever I may order. Rails to be split when I
may say. Each cropper to clean out every ditch in his crop, and where a ditch runs between two
croppers, the cleaning out of that ditch is to be divided equally between them. Every ditch bank in
the crop must be shrubbed down and cleaned off before the crop is planted and must be cut down
every time the land is worked with his hoe and when the crop is “laid by,” the ditch banks must be
left clean of bushes, weeds, and seeds. The cleaning out of all ditches must be done by the first of
October. The rails must be split and the fence repaired before corn is planted.
Each cropper must keep in good repair all bridges in his crop or over ditches that he has to
clean out and when a bridge needs repairing that is outside of all their crops, then any one that I call
on must repair it.
Fence jams to be done as ditch banks. If any cotton is planted on the land outside of the
plantation fence, I am to have three fourths of all the cotton made in those patches, that is to say, no
cotton must be planted by croppers in their home patches.
All croppers must clean out stables and fill them with straw, and haul straw in front of stables
whenever I direct. All the cotton must be manured, and enough fertilizer must be brought to
manure each crop highly, the croppers to pay for one half of all manure bought, the quantity to be
purchased for each crop must be left to me.
No cropper to work off the plantation when there is any work to be done on the land he has
rented, or when his work is needed by me or other croppers. Trees to be cut down on Orchard,
House field & Evanson fences, leaving such as I may designate.
Road field to be planted from the very edge of the ditch to the fence, and all the land to be planted
close up to the ditches and fences. No stock of any kind belonging to croppers to run in the plantation
after crops are gathered.
If the fence should be blown down, or if trees should fall on the fence outside of the land
planted by any of the croppers, any one or all that I may call upon must put it up and repair it. Every
cropper must feed, or have fed, the team he works, Saturday nights, Sundays, and every morning
before going to work, beginning to feed his team (morning, noon, and night every day in the week) on
the day he rents and feeding it to and including the 31st day of December. If any cropper shall from
any cause fail to repair his fence as far as 1000 rails will go, or shall fail to clean out any part of his
147
Chapter 14
ditches, or shall fail to leave his ditch banks, any part of them, well scrubbed and clean when his
crop is laid by, or shall fail to clean out stables, fill them up and haul straw in front of them
whenever he is told, he shall have only two-fifths (2/5) of the cotton, corn, fodder, peas and
pumpkins made on the land he cultivates.
If any cropper shall fail to feed his team Saturday nights, all day Sunday and all the rest of the
week, morning/noon, and night, for every time he so fails he must pay me five cents.
No corn nor cotton stalks must be burned, but must be cut down, cut up and plowed in.
Nothing must be burned off the land except when it is impossible to plow it in.
Every cropper must be responsible for all gear and farming implements placed in his hands,
and if not returned must be paid for unless it is worn out by use.
Croppers must sow & plow in oats and haul them to the crib, but must have no part of them.
Nothing to be sold from their crops, nor fodder nor corn to be carried out of the fields until my rent
is all paid, and all amounts they owe me and for which I am responsible are paid in full.
I am to gin & pack all the cotton and charge every cropper an eighteenth of his part, the
cropper to furnish his part of the bagging, ties, & twine.
The sale of every cropper’s part of the cotton to be made by me when and where I choose to
sell, and after deducting all they owe me and all sums that I may be responsible for on their
accounts, to pay them their half of the net proceeds. Work of every description, particularly the
work on fences and ditches, to be done to my satisfaction, and must be done over until I am
satisfied that it is done as it should be.
No wood to burn, nor light wood, nor poles, nor timber for boards, nor wood for any purpose
whatever must be gotten above the house occupied by Henry Beasley—nor must any trees be cut
down nor any wood used for any purpose, except for firewood, without my permission.
* * * * * *
1.
What responsibilities does the landowner agree to take on in the contract? How do these differ
from the cropper?
2.
What distinctions are made between the growing and selling of cotton and other crops?
148
African Americans in the South in the Late Nineteenth Century, 1875-1900
14–2 John Hill, Testimony on Southern Textile Industry, 1883
In the 1880s the center of the nation’s textile industry began to shift from New England to the southern Piedmont
region. Lower wage rates and close access to raw materials attracted increasing numbers of textile manufacturers.
Conditions in southern textile mills were extremely harsh, and most mill towns were thoroughly dominated by company
agents and plant superintendents. Southern mills employed large numbers of women and children from the surrounding
towns and countryside. A transplanted northerner, John Hill was a mechanical engineer for the Eagle and Phoenix
Manufacturing Company in Columbus, Georgia.
SOURCE: Report of the Committee of the Senate upon the Relations between Labor and Capital, 48th Congress, 4 (1885).
Now as to the efficiency of labor in the two sections. The Southern operative is native born, while
the average Northern operative is not. They have got more Canadian operatives in Manchester,
N.H., than they have natives. Now, as it is a well-known fact to all who have studied the subject, the
elements of mind, the general mental make-up and intelligence of the native American exceeds by
far the average of like qualities in the lower classes of foreigners, the classes who immigrate into this
country to work in mills. So in the same proportion are you likely to find the comparative
intelligence of the Northern and the Southern operatives, the Southern being native and the
Northern being a foreigner. There is more endurance in the constitution in a cold climate than in a
warm one, and our advantage becomes a disadvantage in this respect, where it is a question of hard,
heavy labor. Natural laws would therefore indicate that for heavy labor the Northern operative
would be superior to the Southern, but while this is true, it is also true that a warm climate develops
the human system earlier, and makes the action of both mind and body quicker than in a cold
climate. The natives of warm climates are more impulsive, quicker to learn, and quicker in action,
though not so enduring. This climate advances the period of manhood or womanhood fully a year
and a half over the average climate of New England, so far as development is concerned. A man or a
woman here in Columbus is as far advanced in physical development at fifteen years of age as a like
person would be in Lowell at sixteen and a half years of age.
Now, for cotton manufacturing, capacity to endure hard labor is not a material point, because
the labor is not hard. The motions required are quick rather than laborious, except in certain
departments. In weaving there is probably about as much of one kind as the other, and, of course,
weaving is a very important department.
It may be stated as a general fact, therefore, that in this regard the advantages in the South are
at least equal to those in the North.
In the matter of education the native American of the North averages superior to the native of
the South, owing to the fact that for many years, covering the lives of all the operatives now in the
mills of the North, the free-school system has been universal there, and the necessity of education
has been generally and fully appreciated. In the South, while a free-school system does exist in this
State, yet it is not so far advanced as the free-school system in New England; not so liberal; not so
easy to be availed of. It furnishes less school accommodation in proportion to population, and there
is less disposition on the part of the people to patronize it, and, generally speaking, owing to the very
limited time it has been in existence, the advantages of our free-school system here have not been
reaped by our people to an extent that will at all compare with the benefits that the New England
system has conferred upon the people there.
But again, as compared with foreign help, the probabilities are that even in the matter of
education our Southern operatives have the advantage. In Alabama, South Carolina, and other
States, where no attention has been paid to the free-school system, the operatives have not had the
advantages that they have in Georgia.
The hours of labor in cotton manufacture in the Eagle and Phoenix mills average eleven per
day, but in many mills they average twelve per day. In New England, in some of the States, the law
prescribes ten hours as a day’s work. That is so in Massachusetts, but not in New Hampshire.…
I might state that all mill operatives having to do with the process of cotton manufacturing
involving quick perception and manipulation are white. In portions of the work, where it is only a
149
Chapter 14
question of muscle, and where intelligence is not a necessity, the laborers employed are either black
or white, the preference, where it comes to a matter of mere muscle, being given to the colored
laborer. I refer now to rolling a bale of cotton in, tearing it open, tumbling around boxes and bales,
and such heavy work. It has been found, and is a fact patent to all who have studied the question,
that the employment of colored labor in the finer processes of manufacturing is a question which is
mooted only by those who know nothing about it.…It may be regarded as a fact about which those
who understand the question can have no dispute, that it will be many years before the present
condition of things can be changed. There are places to which each of these labor elements is
specially adapted. The supply of both races is about equal to the demand, and there is an
opportunity for support and for fair and reasonable prosperity open to one race as well as to the
other.
There is a good feeling existing between the employers and the employed, both white and
black, at the South, which is not equaled in any other section of this country, or in Europe either.
There are no strikes here, no rebellions of the laborers, no disposition on the part of labor to
combine against capital, and no disposition on the part of capital to oppress labor. Everything is in
harmony, and a state of harmony and of prosperity in this respect exists which is to be found in no
other place in the civilized world to the same extent as in the cotton States of the South. That is
caused by the fact that there is a liberality upon the part of the employers which dispenses justice to
the employed willingly and cheerfully, and without compulsion. This fact is recognized by the
employees, and where there is justice between capital and labor, and no oppression, there is, of
course, no necessity for collisions, strikes, or animosities.…
Now, I will make another statement which will probably be interesting to people who do not
live here. The cotton States of the South are the only portion of the United States where whites and
blacks work together upon the same work at the same pay and under the same regulations, the only
part of this country where the two races will work side by side, justice being rendered to each, and
the laborers of both races working in harmony and in unison, without rebellion and with mutual
goodwill. I employed on mill No. 3 from fifty to seventy-five brick masons, and probably from
fifteen to twenty rock masons. The men of both races were mixed, working side by side, black and
white. They were paid equal wages, and there was perfect harmony between them and equal
proficiency except in cases where special acquirements were necessary on special work, and, in one
instance, for considerable length of time, a state of facts existed that could not exist in any other
country in the world, viz, that the entire lot of laborers were superintended by a colored man. You
can’t see anything like that in New England, can you? But what I say of the harmonious relations
between the laborers of the two races has particular reference to Georgia, and other States where the
races have not been antagonized by violent a political agitations in the past.…
I have been simply calling attention to the fact that we can do here what you cannot do there;
that is, we can work the two races together on the same work in harmony, and I say again that you
could not do that in the mines of Pennsylvania, in the rolling mills of Pittsburgh, in the
manufacturing establishments of New York, or upon the buildings of New York, Boston, or
Chicago. You could not find or get up in any of those places the same harmonious feeling which
exists here between the races to-day.
The CHAIRMAN. Then it is not really the race question at all. It is simply this that such a large
part of your working population is colored that if you should undertake to exclude them from your
labor market there would be nobody to do the work, and therefore, there being sufficient
employment for both races, they work quietly alongside of each other, neither feeling that it is
necessary to compete with the other for employment.
The WITNESS. Well, always, both before the war and since the war, there has been a better
feeling between the two races here than at the North. The question of race, the question of the color
of a man’s face, does not arise at all in reference to this kind of labor, but in the North it does come
in, and the consequence is that you find it impossible there to work the two races together
harmoniously as we do here. I simply state this as a fact not generally known by parties at the North
who have not investigated it.…
It is only in the proper place that the two races can come together harmoniously. They don’t
come together in the dining-room, they don’t come together in society, but there is a place where
150
African Americans in the South in the Late Nineteenth Century, 1875-1900
they can come together harmoniously, and that is right down on this basis where it is a question of
labor, and where the common sentiment of the people is that the two races are equal. So far as
regards this question of such labor as can earn 60 or 70 cents a day, there is perfect equality between
white and black labor here in the South. But that does not mean at all social equality. It has nothing
to do with politics or with social equality or anything of the kind. It means just 75 cents a day for a
day’s work, whether the laborer is white or black, or $2.50 a day for a black mason, and $2.50 for a
white mason. We have two blacksmiths at work at the Eagle and Phoenix mill, one of them being
white and the other black, and they are on an equality in wages and in work. One of them is a very
intelligent white man and the other is a very intelligent colored man. The question of equality does
not come up with reference to those two men at all. They are both just blacksmiths working at $2.50
a day each, and drawing that amount of wages at the end of the week, and that is all there is to it. We
do not mix the races in the machine shop. It is done only where there seems to be a certain
suitableness in it. We do it on our rock walls and our brick walls, and among our carpenters, and we
pay each one at the same rate for equal work.
Q. And give neither race the preference in selecting the men to be employed?—A. If I want a
man to do certain things I want a colored man every time, while, on the other hand, if I want a man
to do certain other things, I want a white man. I don’t know that it hinges on the question of the
whiteness or blackness of the man’s skin; it hinges rather on the adaptability of the man to do the
particular work that is required.
Q. Now, what have you to say to us in regard to child labor in factories?—A. Well, the child
labor question is different here from what it is in the North, for sundry reasons. In the first place, it
is a lamentable fact that parents here do not recognize the necessity of education to the extent that
they do in the North. In the North all the people, including all the laboring classes, think it a duty to
have their children educated, and the facilities which the free-school system gives them for that
purpose are very largely used. Perhaps the laws of the Northern States regulate the matter somewhat;
but laws are second to facts, and if the sentiment of the people did not justify such laws they would
not be made. Then, too, a law that would be good in that regard in Massachusetts would not be
good for anything in Alabama. You must adapt your laws to the State and conditions of society.
Suppose you should pass a law in Alabama that, up to a certain age, children should not work
because they must go to school, it wouldn’t be good for anything; for the reason that, in the first
place, even if they did not work, they would not go to school, because the parents would not want to
send them, and also because if they did there are no schools to which they could send them
generally. Again, on the other hand, that is not true of Georgia. Of course, I am now speaking only
of the average. There are many people here who would be very apt and anxious to educate their
children, and who would be very glad to send them to school. There are many who do send their
children to school wherever they have the opportunity, but there are many others who do not; from
want of thrift, or from the fact which does not exist elsewhere in this country, that the devastation
produced by the war has swept away the material prosperity of the people and probably set them
back fifty years in that respect, and as a consequence they are unable to educate their children as they
would wish. For these reasons, and also because of the fact generally admitted, that economy is not
one of the strongest points of the Southern people, there are a great many parents who would be
glad to send their children to school, but who have not the opportunity or the means, being
compelled to keep the children employed in procuring the necessaries of life.
In regard to the small children, more especially those in our spinning room, they are worth all
they are paid, and the fact is that the wages they earn are a necessity for the support of the families
from which the children come; so that if they were turned out there would be suffering upon the
part of those families for want of that income. We do not really employ those children as a matter of
preference, but as a matter of necessity. When a family comes here and a portion of them go to
work in the mill they are sure to make application for employment for all their children who are of
sufficient age to go to work in the mill, and they persist in those applications until those children are
employed.
Q. At what ages are the children employed?—A. About ten years, I believe, is the youngest age
at which we employ them.
151
Chapter 14
Q. What do children of ten years and upward do?—A. They do this very light work, attending
the spinning and winding machinery—very light work. There is no work that those children do that
is sufficiently arduous to over-tax them or to interfere with their health or development. Their work
is all light, and the only thing that can tax them is perhaps the hours of labor.…
* * * * * *
1.
152
According to Hill, how and why is the southern textile workforce superior to that in the north?
African Americans in the South in the Late Nineteenth Century, 1875-1900
14–3 Ida B. Wells, A Red Record, 1895
The daughter of slaves, Ida B. Wells began her career as a teacher and journalist in Memphis. During the 1890s, she
began speaking out and writing about the taboo subject of lynching. Wells was convinced that lynching formed a critical
part of the system of racial oppression in the South, often as tool against successful black businesses. She challenged the
myth of black men raping white women, and argued that this myth masked the deeper historical reality of the
systematic rape of black women by white men. Wells’s carefully researched anti-lynching crusade drew international
attention to the issue. She was also active in the black club women movement, woman suffrage, and was a founding
member of the NAACP in 1909.
SOURCE: Ida B. Wells, A Red Record (1895).
Not all or nearly all of the murders done by white men, during the past thirty years in the South,
have come to light, but the statistics as gathered and preserved by white men, and which have not
been questioned, show that during these years more than ten thousand Negroes have been killed in
cold blood, without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution. And yet, as evidence of the
absolute impunity with which the white man dares to kill a Negro, the same record shows that
during all these years, and for all these murders only three white men have been tried, convicted, and
executed. As no white man has been lynched for the murder of colored people, these three
executions are the only instances of the death penalty being visited upon white men for murdering
Negroes.
Naturally enough the commission of these crimes began to tell upon the public conscience, and
the Southern white man, as a tribute to the nineteenth century civilization, was in a manner
compelled to give excuses for his barbarism. His excuses have adapted themselves to the emergency,
and are aptly outlined by that greatest of all Negroes, Frederick Douglass, in a article of recent date,
in which he shows that there have been three distinct eras of Southern barbarism, to account for
which three distinct excuses have been made.
The first excuse given to the civilized world for the murder of unoffending Negroes was the
necessity of the white man to repress and stamp out alleged “race riots.” For years immediately
succeeding the war there was an appalling slaughter of colored people, and the wires usually
conveyed to northern people and the world the intelligence, first, that an insurrection was being
planned by Negroes, which, a few hours later, would prove to have been vigorously resisted by white
men, and controlled with a resulting loss of several killed and wounded. It was always a remarkable
feature in these insurrections and riots that only Negroes were killed during the rioting, and that all
the white men escaped unharmed.
From 1865 to 1872, hundreds of colored men and women were mercilessly murdered and the
almost invariable reason assigned was that they met their death by being alleged participants in an
insurrection or riot. But this story at last wore itself out. No insurrection ever materialized; no Negro
rioter was ever apprehended and proven guilty, and no dynamite ever recorded the black man’s
protest against oppression and wrong .…
Then came the second excuse, which had its birth during the turbulent times of reconstruction.
By an amendment to the Constitution the Negro was given the right of franchise, and, theoretically
at least, his ballot became his invaluable emblem of citizenship.…The southern white man would
not consider that the Negro had any right which a white man was bound to respect, and the idea of
a republican form of government in the southern states grew into general contempt. It was
maintained that “This is a white man’s government,” and regardless of numbers white men should
rule. “No Negro domination” became the new legend on the sanguinary banner of the sunny South,
and under it rode the Ku Klux Klan, the Regulators, and the lawless mobs, which for any cause
chose to murder one man or a dozen as suited their purpose best. It was a long, gory campaign.…
The government which had made the Negro a citizen found itself unable to protect him. It
gave him the right to vote, but denied him the protection which should have maintained that right.
Scourged from his home; hunted through the swamps; hung by midnight raiders, and openly
murdered in the light of day, the Negro clung to his right of franchise with a heroism which would
153
Chapter 14
have wrung admiration from the hearts of savages. He believed that in the small white ballot there
was a subtle something which stood for manhood as well as citizenship, and thousands of brave
black men went to their graves, exemplifying the one by dying for the other.
The white man’s victory soon became complete by fraud, violence, intimidation and murder.
The franchise vouchsafed to the Negro grew to be a “barren ideality,” and regardless of numbers,
the colored people found themselves voiceless in the councils of those whose duty it was to
rule.…With the Southern governments all subverted and the Negro actually eliminated from all
participation in state and national elections, there could be no longer an excuse for killing Negroes
to prevent “Negro Domination.”
Brutality still continued, Negroes were whipped, scourged, exiled, shot and hung whenever and
wherever it pleased the white man so to treat them, and as the civilized world with increasing
persistency held the white people of the South to account for its outlawry, the murderers invented
the third excuse—that Negroes had to he killed to avenge their assaults upon women.…
Humanity abhors the assailant of womanhood, and this charge upon the Negro at once placed
him beyond the pale of human sympathy.…
If the Southern people in defense of their lawlessness, would tell the truth and admit that
colored men and women are lynched for almost any offense, from murder to a misdemeanor, there
would not now be the necessity for this defense. But when they intentionally, maliciously and
constantly belie the record and bolster up these falsehoods by the words of legislators, preachers,
governors and bishops, then the Negro must give to the world his side of the awful story.
A word as to the charge itself. In considering the third reason assigned by the Southern white
people for the butchery of blacks, the question must be asked, what the white man means when he
charges the black man with rape. Does he mean the crime which the statutes of the states describe as
such? Not by any means. With the Southern white man, any misalliance existing between a white
woman and a colored man is a sufficient foundation for the charge of rape. The Southern white man
says that it is impossible for a voluntary alliance to exist between a white woman and a colored man,
and therefore, the fact of an alliance is a proof of force. In numerous instances where colored men
have been lynched on the charge of rape, it was positively known at the time of lynching, and
indisputably proven after the victim’s death, that the relationship sustained between the man and the
woman was voluntary and clandestine, and that in no court of law could even the charge of assault
have been successfully maintained.
It was for the assertion of this fact, in the defense of her own race, that the writer hereof
became an exile; her property destroyed and her return to her home forbidden under penalty of
death, for writing the following editorial which was printed in her paper, the Free Speech, in Memphis,
Tenn., May 21, 1892:
“Eight Negroes lynched since last issue of the Free Speech one at Little Rock, Ark., last Saturday
morning where the citizens broke (?) into the penitentiary and got their man; three near Anniston,
Ala., one near New Orleans; and three at Clarksville, Ga., the last three for killing a white man, and
five on the same old racket—the new alarm about raping white women. The same program of
hanging, then shooting bullets into the lifeless bodies was carried out to the letter. Nobody in this
section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If
Southern white men are not careful, they will over-reach themselves and public sentiment will have a
reaction; a conclusion will then he reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of
their women.”
But threats cannot suppress the truth, and while the Negro suffers the soul deformity, resultant
from two and a half centuries of slavery, he is no more guilty of this vilest of all vile charges than the
white man who would blacken his name.
During all the years of slavery, no such charge was ever made, not even during the dark days of
the rebellion.... While the master was away fighting to forge the fetters upon the slave, he left his
wife and children with no protectors save the Negroes themselves.…
Likewise during the period of alleged “insurrection,” and alarming “race riots,” it never
occurred to the white man, that his wife and children were in danger of assault. Nor in the
Reconstruction era, when the hue and cry was against “Negro Domination,” was there ever a
154
African Americans in the South in the Late Nineteenth Century, 1875-1900
thought that the domination would ever contaminate a fireside or strike to death the virtue of
womanhood.…
It is not the purpose of this defense to say one word against the white women of the South.
Such need not be said, but it is their misfortune that the…white men of that section…to justify their
own barbarism…assume a chivalry which they do not possess. True chivalry respects all
womanhood, and no one who reads the record, as it is written in the faces of the million mulattos in
the South, will for a minute conceive that the southern white man had a very chivalrous regard for
the honor due the women of his race or respect for the womanhood which circumstances placed in
his power.... Virtue knows no color line, and the chivalry which depends upon complexion of skin
and texture of hair can command no honest respect.
When emancipation came to the Negroes…from every nook and corner of the North, brave
young white women…left their cultured homes, their happy associations and their lives of ease, and
with heroic determination went to the South to carry light and truth to the benighted blacks.... They
became social outlaws in the South. The peculiar sensitiveness of the southern white men for
women, never shed its protecting influence about them. No friendly word from their own race
cheered them in their work; no hospitable doors gave them the companionship like that from which
they had come. No chivalrous white man doffed his hat in honor or respect. They were “Nigger
teachers”—unpardonable offenders in the social ethics of the South, and were insulted, persecuted
and ostracized, not by Negroes, but by the white manhood which boasts of its chivalry toward
women.
And yet these northern women worked on, year after year.…Threading their way through
dense forests, working in schoolhouse, in the cabin and in the church, thrown at all times and in all
places among the unfortunate and lowly Negroes, whom they had come to find and to serve, these
northern women, thousands and thousands of them, have spent more than a quarter of a century in
giving to the colored people their splendid lessons for home and heart and soul. Without protection,
save that which innocence gives to every good woman, they went about their work, fearing no
assault and suffering none. Their chivalrous protectors were hundreds of miles away in their
northern homes, and yet they never feared any “great dark faced mobs.”…They never complained
of assaults, and no mob was ever called into existence to avenge crimes against them. Before the
world adjudges the Negro a moral monster, a vicious assailant of womanhood and a menace to the
sacred precincts of home, the colored people ask the consideration of the silent record of gratitude,
respect, protection and devotion of the millions of the race in the South, to the thousands of
northern white women who have served as teachers and missionaries since the war.…
* * * * * *
1.
Why does Wells devote so much space to southern race relations of the past? How does she
interpret the Reconstruction era and use it for her argument?
2.
Compare the tone and substance of Wells’s piece to that of Washington’s, written in the same
year. How do you think he might have responded to her work?
155
Chapter 14
14-4
Anna Julia Cooper, From A Voice from the South: By a Black
Woman of the South, 1892
Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, Anna Julia Cooper was the daughter of a slave. Anna was educated at St.
Augumne Normal School and Collegiate Institute, and in 1877 she married one of her teachers, George A. C.
Cooper. By 1881, Cooper (a widow since her husband's death in 1879) was attending Oberlin College in Ohio.
Earning a degree in 1884, she accepted a position in Ohio at Wilberforce University, but she stayed only a year,
leaving to take a position at St. Augustine. After being awarded an MA from Oberlin College, she relocated to
Washington, D.C., to teach at M Street School, where she served as principal from 1901 to 1906. Her speeches and
essays were collected in A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South (1892). She advocated civil rights,
women‘s rights, suffrage for women, and an American literature that would be more inclusive and would render
respectful images of African Americans. Believing in the importance of education for black Americans, she became one
of the first African American women to receive a Ph.D. when she earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne at age 65.
Cooper gave a voice to the disenfranchised black women of the nineteenth century while anticipating the feminist
movement of the twentieth century.
SOURCE: A Voice From the South, Anna Julia Cooper. Xenia, Ohio: The Aldine Printing House, 1892
The Status of Woman in America
Just four hundred years ago an obscure dreamer and castle builder, prosaically poor and ridiculously
insistent on the reality of his dreams, was enabled through the devotion of a noble woman to give to
civilization a magnificent continent.
What the lofty purpose of Spain’s pure-minded queen had brought to the birth, the untiring
devotion of pioneer women nourished and developed. The dangers of wild beasts and of wilder
men, the mysteries of unknown wastes and unexplored forests, the horrors of pestilence and famine,
of exposure and loneliness, during all those years of discovery and settlement, were braved without a
murmur by women who had been most delicately constituted and most tenderly nurtured.
And when the times of physical hardship and danger were past, when the work of clearing
and opening up was over and the struggle for accumulation began, again woman’s inspiration and
help were needed and still was she loyally at hand. A Mary Lyon, demanding and making possible
equal advantages of education for women as for men, and, in the face of discouragement and
incredulity, bequeathing to women the opportunities of Holyoke.
A Dorothea Dix, insisting on the humane and rational treatment of the insane and bringing
about a reform in the lunatic asylums of the country, making a great step forward in the tender
regard for the weak by the strong throughout the world.
A Helen Hunt Jackson, convicting the nation of a century of dishonor in regard to the
Indian.
A Lucretia Mott, gentle Quaker spirit, with sweet insistence, preaching the abolition of
slavery and the institution, in its stead, of the brotherhood of man; her life and words breathing out
in tender melody the injunction
Have love. Not love alone for one
But man as man thy brother call;
And scatter, like the circling sun,
Thy charities on all.
And at the most trying time of what we have called the Accumulative Period, when
internecine war, originated through man’s love of gain and his determination to subordinate national
interests and black men’s rights alike to considerations of personal profit and loss, was drenching
our country with its own best blood, who shall recount the name and fame of the women on both
sides the senseless strife,—those uncomplaining souls with a great heart ache of their own, rigid
features and pallid cheek their ever effective flag of truce, on the battle field, in the camp, in the hos156
African Americans in the South in the Late Nineteenth Century, 1875-1900
pital, binding up wounds, recording dying whispers for absent loved ones, with tearful eyes pointing
to man’s last refuge, giving the last earthly hand clasp and performing the last friendly office for
strangers whom a great common sorrow had made kin, while they knew that somewhere—
somewhere a husband, a brother, a father, a son, was being tended by stranger hands—or mayhap
those familiar eyes were even then being closed forever by just such another ministering angel of
mercy and love.
But why mention names? Time would fail to tell of the noble army of women who shine like
beacon lights in the otherwise sordid wilderness of this accumulative period—prison reformers and
tenement cleansers, quiet unnoted workers in hospitals and homes, among imbeciles, among
outcasts—the sweetening, purifying antidotes for the poisons of man's acquisitiveness,—mollifying
and soothing with the tenderness of compassion and love the wounds and bruises caused by his
overreaching and avarice.
The desire for quick returns and large profits tempts capital ofttimes into unsanitary; well
nigh inhuman investments,—tenement tinder boxes, stilling, stunting, sickening alleys and
pestiferous slums; regular rents, no waiting, large percentages,—rich coffers coined out of the lifeblood of human bodies and souls. Men and women herded together like cattle, breathing in malaria
and typhus from an atmosphere seething with moral as well as physical impurity; reveling in vice as
their native habitat and then, to drown the whisperings of their higher consciousness and effectually
to hush the yearnings and accusations within, flying to narcotics and opiates—rum, tobacco, opium,
binding hand and foot, body and soul, till the proper image of God is transformed into a fit
associate for demons,—a besotted, enervated, idiotic wreck, or else a monster of wickedness terrible
and destructive.
These are some of the legitimate products of the unmitigated tendencies of the wealthproducing period. But, thank Heaven, side by side with the cold, mathematical, selfishly calculating,
so-called practical and unsentimental instinct of the business man, there comes the sympathetic
warmth and sunshine of good women, like the sweet and sweetening breezes of spring, cleansing,
purifying, soothing, inspiring, lifting the drunkard from the gutter, the, outcast from the pit. Who
can estimate the influence of these “daughters of the king,” these lend-a-hand forces, in
counteracting the selfishness of an acquisitive age?
To-day America counts her millionaires by the thousand; questions of tariff and questions of
currency are the most vital ones agitating the public mind. In this period, when material prosperity
and well earned ease and luxury are assured facts from a national standpoint, woman’s work and
woman’s influence are needed as never before; needed to bring a heart power into this money
getting, dollar-worshipping civilization; needed to bring a moral force into the utilitarian motives and
interests of the time; needed to stand for God and Home and Native Land versus gain and greed
and grasping selfishness.
There can be no doubt that this fourth centenary of America’s discovery which we celebrate
at Chicago, strikes the keynote of another important transition in the history of this nation; and the
prominence of woman in the management of its celebration is a fitting tribute to the part she is
destined to play among the forces of the future. This is the first congressional recognition of woman
in this country, and this Board of Lady Managers constitute the first women legally appointed by any
government to act in a national capacity. This of itself marks the dawn of a new day.
Now the periods of discovery, of settlement, of developing resources and accumulating
wealth have passed in rapid succession. Wealth in the nation as in the individual brings leisure,
repose, reflection. The struggle with nature is over, the struggle with ideas begins. ‘We stand then, it
seems to me, in this last decade of the nineteenth century, just in the portals of a new and untried
movement on a higher plain and in a grander strain than any the past has called forth. It does not
require a prophet’s eye to divine its trend and image its possibilities from the forces we see already at
work around us; nor is it hard to guess what must be the status of woman’s work under the new
regime.
In the pioneer days her role was that of a camp-follower, an additional something to fight
for and be burdened with, only repaying the anxiety and labor she called forth by her own
incomparable gifts of sympathy and appreciative love; unable herself ordinarily to contend with the
bear and the Indian, or to take active part in clearing the wilderness and constructing the home.
157
Chapter 14
In the second or wealth producing period her work is abreast of man’s, complementing and
supplementing, counteracting excessive tendencies, and mollifying over rigorous proclivities.
In the era now about to dawn, her sentiments must strike the keynote and give the dominant
tone. And this because of the nature of her contribution to the world.
Her kingdom is not over physical forces. Not by might, nor by power can she prevail. Her
position must ever be inferior where strength of muscle creates leadership. If she follows the
instincts of her nature, however, she must always stand for the conservation of those deeper moral
forces which make for the happiness of homes and the righteousness of the country. In a reign of
moral ideas she is easily queen.
There is to my mind no grander and surer prophecy of the new era and of woman’s place in
it, than the work already begun in the waning years of the nineteenth century by the America, an
organization which has even now reached not only national but international importance, and seems
destined to permeate and purify the whole civilized world. It is the living embodiment of woman’s
activities and woman’s ideas, and its extent and strength rightly prefigure her increasing power as a
moral factor.
The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country. In a
period of itself transitional and unsettled, her status seems one of the least ascertainable and
definitive of all the forces which make for our civilization. She is confronted by both a woman
question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or an unacknowledged factor in both. While
the women of the white race can with calm assurance enter upon the work they feel by nature
appointed to do, while their men give loyal support and appreciative countenance to their efforts,
recognizing in most avenues of usefulness the propriety and the need of woman’s distinctive cooperation, the colored woman too often finds herself hampered and shamed by a less liberal
sentiment and a more conservative attitude on the part of those for whose opinion she cares most.
That this is not universally true I am glad to admit. There are to be found both intensely
conservative white men and exceedingly liberal colored men. But as far as my experience goes the
average man of our race is less frequently ready to admit the actual need among the sturdier forces
of the world for woman’s help or influence. That great social and economic questions await her
interference, that she could throw any light on problems of national import, that her intermeddling
could improve the management of school systems, or elevate the tone of public institutions, or
humanize and sanctify the far reaching influence of prisons and reformatories and improve the
treatment of lunatics and imbeciles,—that she has a word worth hearing on mooted questions in
political economy, that she could contribute a suggestion on the relations of labor and capital, or
offer a thought on honest money and honorable trade, I fear the majority of “Americans of the
colored variety” are not yet prepared to concede. It may be that they do not yet see these questions
in their right perspective, being absorbed in the immediate needs of their own political
complications. A good deal depends on where we put the emphasis in this world; and our men are
not perhaps to blame if they see everything colored by the light of those agitations in the midst of
which they live and move and have their being. The part they have had to play in American history
during the last twenty-five or thirty years has tended rather to exaggerate the importance of mere
political advantage, as well as to set a fictitious valuation on those able to secure such advantage. It is
the astute politician, the manager who can gain preferment for himself and his favorites, the
demagogue known to stand in with the powers at the White House and consulted on the bestowal
of government plums, whom we set in high places and denominate great. It is they who receive the
hosannas of the multitude and are regarded as leaders of the people. The thinker and the doer, the
man who solves the problem by enriching his country with an invention worth thousands or by a
thought inestimable and precious is given neither bread nor a stone. He is too often left to die in
obscurity and neglect even if spared in his life the bitterness of fanatical jealousies and detraction.
And yet politics, and surely American politics, is hardly a school for great minds. Sharpening
rather than deepening, it develops the faculty of taking advantage of present emergencies rather than
the insight to distinguish between the true and the false, the lasting and the ephemeral advantage.
Highly cultivated selfishness rather than consecrated benevolence is its passport to success. Its
votaries are never seers. At best they are but manipulators—often only jugglers. It is conducive
neither to profound statesmanship nor to the higher type of manhood. Altruism is its mauvais succes
158
African Americans in the South in the Late Nineteenth Century, 1875-1900
and naturally enough it is indifferent to any factor which cannot be worked into its own immediate
aims and purposes. As woman's influence as a political element is as yet nil in most of the
commonwealths of our republic, it is not surprising that with those who place the emphasis on mere
political capital she may yet seem almost a nonentity so far as it concerns the solution of great
national or even racial perplexities.
There are those, however, who value the cairn elevation of the thoughtful spectator who
stands aloof from the heated scramble; and, above the turmoil and din of corruption and selfishness,
can listen to the teachings of eternal truth and righteousness. There are even those who feel that the
black man’s unjust and unlawful exclusion temporarily from participation in the elective franchise in
certain states is after all but a lesson “in the desert” fitted to develop in him insight and discrimination against the day of his own appointed tune. One needs occasionally to stand aside from
the hum and rush of human interests and passions to hear the voices of God. And it not
unfrequently happens that the All-loving gives a great push to certain souls to thrust them out, as it
were, from the distracting current for awhile to promote their discipline and growth, or to enrich
them by communion and reflection. And similarly it may be woman's privilege from her peculiar
coigne of vantage as a quiet observer, to whisper just the needed suggestion or the almost forgotten
truth. The colored woman, then, should not be ignored because her bark is resting in the silent
waters of the sheltered cove. She is watching the movements of the contestants none the less and is
all the better qualified, perhaps, to weigh and judge and advise because not herself in the excitement
of the race. Her voice, too, has always been heard in dear unfaltering tones, ringing the changes on
those deeper interests which make for permanent good. She is always sound and orthodox on
questions affecting the well-being of her race. You do not find the colored woman selling her
birthright for a mess of pottage. Nay, even after reason has retired from the contest, she has been
known to ding blindly with the instinct of a turtle dove to those principles and policies which to her
mind promise hope and safety for children yet unborn. It is notorious that ignorant black women in
the South have actually left their husbands’ homes and repudiated their support for what was
understood by the wife to be race disloyalty or “voting away,” as she expresses it, the privileges of
herself and little ones.
It is largely our women in the South today who keep the black men solid in the Republican
party. The latter as they increase in intelligence and power of discrimination would be more apt to
divide on local issues at any rate. They begin to see that the Grand Old Party regards the Negro’s
cause as an outgrown issue, and on Southern soil at least finds a too intimate acquaintanceship with
him a somewhat unsavory recommendation. Then, too, their political wits have been sharpened to
appreciate the fact that it is good policy to cultivate one’s neighbors and not depend too much on a
distant friend to fight one’s home battles. But the black woman can never forget—however
lukewarm the party may to-day appear—that it was a Republican president who struck the manacles
from her own wrists and gave the possibilities of manhood to her helpless little ones; and to her
mind a Democratic Negro is a traitor and a time-server. Talk as much as you like of venality and
manipulation in the South, there are not many men, I can tell you, who would dare face a wife
quivering in every fiber with the consciousness that her husband is a coward who could be paid to
desert her deepest and dearest interests.
Not unfelt, then, if unproclaimed has been the work and influence of the colored women of
America. Our list of chieftains in the service, though not long, is not inferior in strength and
excellence, I dare believe, to any similar list which this country can produce.
Among the pioneers, Frances Watkins Harper could sing with prophetic exaltation in the
darkest days, when as yet there was not a rift in the clouds overhanging her people:
Yes, Ethiopia shall stretch
Her bleeding hands abroad;
Her cry of agony shall reach the burning throne of God.
Redeemed from dust and freed from chains
Her sons shall lift their eyes,
From cloud-capt hills and verdant plains
Shall shouts of triumph rise.
159
Chapter 14
Among preachers of righteousness, an unanswerable silencer of cavilers and objectors, was
Sojourner Truth, that unique and rugged genius who seemed carved out without hand or chisel from
the solid mountain mass; and in pleasing contrast, Amanda Smith, sweetest of natural singers and
pleaders in dulcet tones for the things of God and of His Christ.
Sarah Woodson Early and Martha Briggs, planting and watering in the school room, and
giving off from their matchless and irresistible personality an impetus and inspiration which can
never die so long as there lives and breathes a remote descendant of their disciples and friends.
Charlotte Forten Grimke, the gentle spirit whose verses and life link her so beautifully with
Americas great Quaker poet and loving reformer.
Hallie Quinn Brown, charming reader, earnest, effective lecturer and devoted worker of
unflagging zeal and unquestioned power.
Fannie Jackson Coppin, the teacher and organizer, pre-eminent among women of whatever
country or race in constructive and executive force.
These women represent all shades of belief and as many departments of activity; but they
have one thing in common—their sympathy with the oppressed race in America and the
consecration of their several talents in whatever line to the work of its deliverance and development.
Fifty years ago woman’s activity according to orthodox definitions was on a pretty clearly cut
“sphere,” including primarily the kitchen and the nursery, and rescued from the barrenness of prison
bars by the womanly mania for adorning every discoverable bit of china or canvass with forlorn
looking cranes balanced idiotically on one foot. The woman of to-day finds herself in the presence
of responsibilities which ramify through the profoundest and most varied interests of her country
and race. Not one of the issues of this plodding, toiling, sinning, repenting, falling, aspiring humanity
can afford to shut her out, or can deny the reality of her influence. No plan for renovating society,
no scheme for purifying politics, no reform in church or in state, no moral, social, or economic
question, no movement upward or downward in the human plane is lost on her. A man once said
when told his house was afire: “Go tell my wife; I never meddle with household affairs.” But no
woman can possibly put herself or her sex outside any of the interests that affect humanity. All
departments in the new era are to be hers, in the sense that her interests are in all and through all;
and it is incumbent on her to keep intelligently and sympathetically en rapport with all the great
movements of her time, that she may know on which side to throw the weight of her influence. She
stands now at the gateway of this new era of American civilization. In her hands must be moulded
the strength, the wit, the statesmanship, the morality, all the psychic force, the social and economic
intercourse of that era. To be alive at such an epoch is a privilege, to be a woman then is sublime.
In this last decade of our century; changes of such moment are in progress, such new and
alluring vistas are opening out before us, such original and radical suggestions for the adjustment of
labor and capital, of government and the governed, of the family, the church and the state, that to be
a possible factor though an infinitesimal in such a movement is pregnant with hope and weighty
with responsibility. To be a woman in such an age carries with it a privilege and an opportunity
never implied before. But to be a woman of the Negro race in America, and to be able to grasp the
deep significance of the possibilities of the crisis, is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in the
ages. In the first place, the race is young and full of the elasticity and hopefulness of youth. All its
achievements are before it. It does not look on the masterly triumphs of nineteenth century
civilization with that blasé world-weary look which characterizes the old washed out and worn out
races which have already, so to speak, seen their best days.
Said a European writer recently: “Except the Sclavonic, the Negro is the only original and
distinctive genius which has yet to come to growth—and the feeling is to cherish and develop it.”
Everything to this race is new and strange and inspiring. There is a quickening of its pulses
and a glowing of its self-consciousness. Aha, I can rival that! I can aspire to that! I can honor my
name and vindicate my race! Something like this,
it strikes me, is the enthusiasm which stirs the genius of young Africa in America; and the memory
of past oppression and the fact of present attempted repression only serve to gather momentum for
its irrepressible powers. Then again, a race in such a stage of growth is peculiarly sensitive to
160
African Americans in the South in the Late Nineteenth Century, 1875-1900
impressions. Not the photographer’s sensitized plate is more delicately impressionable to outer
influences than is this high strung people here on the threshold of a career.
What a responsibility then to have the sole management of the primal lights and shadows!
Such is the colored woman’s office. She must stamp weal or woe on the coming history of this
people. May she see her opportunity and vindicate her high prerogative.
* * * * * *
1.
How does Cooper feel about politics? What reasons does she give for these feelings?
161