Images of race / edited with an introduction by Michael D. Biddiss.

Date:
1979
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Images of race / edited with an introduction by Michael D. Biddiss. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    110/268 (page 106)
    106 IMAGES OF RACE drinking. The water was for white people, not for blacks. It was thought apparently that the touch of a negro's lips would be pollution to the tin can from which others drank, and that the stain could not be washed out, any more than that on Lady Macbeth's hand, by all the water of the ocean. This negro, though unable to read or write, had influence enough with some one who could, to procure the publication of a statement of the case in some of the newspapers; but all the satisfaction he got from the railway officials whose conduct he impugned was the assertion, that he had been very generously treated in being allowed a seat in the car; and that the next time he attempted to travel on that line, he would either be excluded altogether, put into the cattle-truck, or locked up by himself. In some of the Western States, Indiana among the number, a negro is not allowed to settle, or even to enter without satisfactory proof to the proper authorities at the frontier, or the nearest town to it, that he only intends to pass through, and that he has money enough to pay his way while he remains in the prohibited territory. In all menial offices, the negro is not only tolerated but approved of; but if he presume to step out of his sphere and claim either social or political fellowship with the dominant race, he speedily finds to his sorrow that he has made a mistake. The 'Tribune,' edited very ably, zealously, and honestly by Mr Horace Greeley, and the 'Independent,' a religious paper lately edited by the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, and now by the Rev. Theodore Tilton, may each, to the full scope of their will, knowledge, and earnestness, advocate the cause of the negro—assert his complete social and political, as well as legal equality with the white man—and maintain, as the latter once did, that the blood of the white race would be greatly improved by an admixture with that of the black; but if either of those influential editors ventured to carry his preaching into practice so far as to employ a black compositor in his composing-rooms, or a black pressman at his printing-presses, the whole of his white workmen would immediately strike work and leave the premises, even though the ruin of their employers might be the result. The same principles that lead workmen in England and Scotland to establish trades-unions, lead the working classes in America to combine against the negro. They not only despise and look down upon him as an inferior, on account of his colour, but they dread his competition in the labour-market; for they know that his