Frederick Douglass Quotes

Taft, very progressive on racial matters, was a little too optimistic. The “intelligent” Southerners were in the small minority. Only a week after Taft made this statement, Joseph Gorden, a Negro, was lynched outside Greenwood, Mississippi.

The great contralto singer, Marian Anderson, an African American, had been refused by the Daughters of the American Revolution the use of Constitution Hall as a venue for her concert based on their White Performers Only policy. First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, resigned in protest from the DAR and she and the President asked Secretary Ickes to arrange a public concert at the Lincoln Memorial and he did. There was no Civil Rights Act at the time.

The Nixon "Southern Strategy" was that if the Republican Party made extensive efforts to appeal to minorities, given the previous decades of support of white supremacy, they would only be successful with a few, whereas if the Party went in the other direction and supported the Whites fighting against the Democratic initiated, racist hated, Civil Rights Act, they would get almost all the racist Southern Democrats, which were most white males and many white females. This racist policy enabled the Republicans to gain control of the Federal Government more often than not whereas before, it was very unusual.

Eight years and a Civil War later, he had changed his mind and was the sponsor of the Civil Rights Act of 1866—the first Federal civil rights law in America. See {587711}.

As enlightened and progressive that his views on Blacks were, he was amazingly racist when it came to Native Americans. See {588991}.

After signing the Emancipation Proclamation:

The organization was one of the first organized to agitate against the slave trade. He had organized many of the intellectual leaders of France to join in this effort.

The editor at the time was Dr. William H. Boyle but no one is sure whether he, the owner, or someone else, wrote the editorial. The quotation illustrated a fascinating twist of logic that was very commonly held at the time. “If God created men of different colors, he must have meant them to be separate.” It is fascinating that virtually no one at the time made a similar argument about hair or eye color, intellect or other differential traits of people. Although this logical fallacy waned in the latter part of the 20th century, there are some who still hold to it.

Supervisors of black soldiers reminded them that

Note that he referred to the “martyred President” as if Lincoln had recently been assassinated. It was actually 33 years after, and many of his audience had lived through what for most was their greatest national trauma. Springfield was the hometown of Lincoln and many in the audience had served under Lincoln in the Union Army. At that time, a statement like this praising Blacks was hated in the South, and unusual even in the North. However, politically the Solid South then always voted for the Democrats, so he and his party would never win any Southern States anyway, but the KKK was active in Illinois and many other Northern States. Adjacent Indiana was the headquarters of the KKK. There was much racism in the North so this speech was quite courageous. Republican Presidents Hayes, McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt made significant inroads in the racial problem and brought Blacks into Federal jobs. The progress, however, was totally undone by Woodrow Wilson who fired most Blacks who had gotten Federal jobs. Wilson needed the Southern legislators which was a major component of his party. He also came from New Jersey which had a strong KKK element who pressured him. Jim Crowe, the KKK and racism increased and the Republican Presidents thereafter did little for Civil rights. The great progress was made by Democratic Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Truman, and Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party replaced the Republicans as the Civil Rights party, and the Southern Democratic politicians switched to the Republican Party ending its traditional leadership in race relations

Jamaica, then part of the British Empire which had outlawed slavery, was quite racially integrated with negroes and mulattos in civil positions such as magistrate. When the ship landed, the slave, John Anderson, was kept locked below deck since if he ran off and reached shore, the Jamaican authorities would have declared him a free man. The presence of the captive negro slave leaked out and a group of Jamaicans boarded the ship uninvited and forcibly removed Anderson, He was taken before a Jamaican magistrate who declared him a free person. The ship’s captain demanded that the authorities return the American private property which had been stolen from an American ship by a “mob”. Harrison, the US Counsel complained to the Jamaican Governor of the “Insult” to the American Flag that had taken place and demanded redress. In both efforts, the original decision of the magistrate was supported and Anderson was a free man. Harrison, an ardent Southerner from Virginia was apoplectic and asked the State Department to make this case a major issue in relations with London. His description of the public opinion then in Jamaica was classic. His racial bias was even supplemented by a virulent anti-Semitism because not only had Jewish Jamaican merchants supported abolition of slavery but some had intermarried with Negroes who had converted to Judaism.