Minneapolis spokesman. [volume] (Minneapolis, Minn.) 1934-2000, 1943-10-22

ploltatlon became the beating heart
and lifeblood of the Republican
Party. Continued strife with the
South was now bad for business,
and the South remained unyielding
in its demand for political and eco
nomic debasement for the Negro.
The North was now faced with the
choice of Southern markets, or con-
tinued interest in the Negroes
welfare. Very quickly, and with
thoroughness, the Negroes welfare
was sacrificed. Under the inspira-
ton of its industrial masters, rather
than in a spirit of justice and sound
law, the Supreme Court in the
1S70's began a series of narrow
and Gripping interpretations of the
Civil War amendments and the
congressional acts which had been
passed to ensure political suffrage
for the Negro. The black man was
turned back to his former masters;
and in 1876 the deal was anointed
forever. In this significant year
the Northern Democrats who were
supporting Garfield in a close con-
test for the presidential candidacy
made a cold-blooded bargain with
the Southern states by which, in
return for their support of Gar
field, they were assured a free
hand for all time in their dealings
with the Negro.
The most shameless aspect of this
trading was the arrant hypocrisy of
the liberals of that day. After 1876,
in the words of Charles A. Beard,
agitation of the Negro question
became bad form in the North"
Most of the leading anti-slavery
agitators who were still living
men of such stature as Carl SchurZ,
E. L. Godkin, James Bryce and
Thomas Wentworth Higginson-
piously condoned the deal and be-
gan to express their belief that
Southern Negroes were unworthy
of political suffrage.
In this manner, throughout the
history of the race question, the
Negroes friends" both North and
South could be counted on eventual
ly to take the path of least resis-
lance; to pursue some policy that
would create a minimum amount
of inconvenience, and of fundamen-
tai readjustment, for the white
race, and a minimum amount of
progress for the black; and they
could be counted on also to ration
alize this betrayal of principle in
whatever happened to be the cur
rent name for expediency-gradual-
ism, realism, common sense. Mill
tant women who could march in
suffragette parades could also find
it in themselves to accept custom
airy or legal discrimination against
Negroes without batting an eye;
men who could write tracts in be-
half of the eight-hour day could
also fly with their neighbors to
city council for restrictive ordi-
nances if a Negro residential sec
ton encroached upon their prop
erty; and labor unions, founded to
resist the exploitation of the work
ing classes, could be depended on
to deny their communal fraternity
to Negro workers, to aid and even
insist upon their exploitation by
the bosses.
The reason for this historic white
faint-heartedness grows out of the
omnipresent, insistent anti-Negro
propaganda inherent in every facet
of our culture. Sometimes it sprang
from a conscious and cynical inten-
ton to keep the Negro peasant,
an unskilled worker, a low-wage
labor source open to exploitation
by white ownership; but just as Of
ten it grew out of a deep psyche
logical fear of a Strange" race, a
race with superficial markings dra-
matically differing from the white
norm; and deeply involved in this
fear was a case of bad conscience.
The white soul is saturated with
fear; white culture embedded with
in itself, and perpetuated at all
cost, every educational device that
was possible to teach this fear of
the stranger, and buttress it
through customs, myths and old
wives tales. And white America
as we'll as black America was VIC
timized in the process.