There were free blacks in the South
before the Civil War. Typically, they won their freedom from masters who “manumitted”
them, often in a will, and conferring freedom upon the master’s death. And
until the KKK raged in 1866 and thereafter, many free blacks were employed
side-by-side with whites.
This example would serve our nation
well today—that people could look past the popular prejudices of their time, work together, and avoid making much noise about their affairs.
Today, my students are reading this
account:
“In many places in the South,
white mechanics and Negro mechanics worked side by side with little or no
friction. A letter of H. Crowell to the editor of the Federal Union, Milledgeville, Ga,. dated March 18, 1836, speaks of
a boat building establishment on the Flint River where there were ‘ten or fifteen
white mechanics, and some twenty or more Negroes, working well.”
Buckingham in discussing a cotton
mill at Athens, Ga. in 1839 says: ‘There is no difficulty among them on account
of color, the white girls working in the same room and at the same loom with
the black girls; and boys of each color, as well as men and women, working
together without repugnance or objection…. The Negroes here are found to be
quite as easily taught to perform the required duties of spinners and weavers
as the whites.”
Source: W.E.B. DuBois, The Negro
Artisan (1912). Prof. DuBois was a leading African American scholar in the
early 1900s, who taught and researched at Atlanta University, a university for
blacks created during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation.
No comments:
Post a Comment