John Mercer Langston Quotes
Of all the peculiar classes with which we have to deal in settling the Southern problem, [there is]--a class of white men peculiarly and intimately related to the colored class by ties of blood and kinship. I refer to a class of white men who have not hesitated to establish the relations named, by recognizing, in many instances, the offspring of their slave women as their own children
John Mercer Langston, 1829-1897, Abolitionist, City Councilman of Oberlin, Ohio, Director, National Equal Rights League, Speech, Congregational Tabernacle, Jersey City, New Jersey, April 17, 1877
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Sexual abuse of female slaves was very common in the American South. See {642027} and {642028}. In the 1930s over 2,300 formerly enslaved African Americans were interviewed by members of the Federal Writers' Project, a New Deal agency in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression. This particular abuse was one of the most common reported. Ironically, the Southern justification for segregation and prohibition of inter-marriage even through the 1950s, was to prevent the great “crime” of miscegenation which white slave owners and their male friends committed by raping and sexually exploiting the female slaves. Today, as DNA analysis shows, most traditional Southern “white” families have recent Negroes in their ancestry.
Lawrence was one of the very advanced scientists of his time presaging Darwin on a few issues. But he erroneously believed that character and intellect were heretical capabilities. Intellect has been shown to be an inheritable trait to some extent (50-60 percent), but it is not racial per se. And character as we now know is not inherited.
The Boers were generally furious because the British emancipated the Blacks that the Boers were holding as slaves. This hurt their economic interests. But according to this woman in the middle of it all, the worst of it was the insult of giving the Blacks political and functional equality. This was really very similar to most American Southern racist feeling during Reconstruction. Racism is very pernicious, in that the remedies always bring about insult and anger because the belief structure of slavery and discrimination must be based in a theory of inferiority.
Bilbo was one of the worst racists who ever served in the Congress.
The bill never became law although it had quite a bit of support.
In 1831 a slave preacher, Nat Turner, led a rebellion in North Carolina killing over 50 whites. Even though Turner and the rebels were captured and executed, whites throughout the South, took vengeance on any slaves they could find. This description was of a North Carolina community.
Brigham Young, the Mormon Leader and Territorial Governor, was strongly opposed to Interracial sex. See {629150}. An earlier clause provided for loss of the rights to a slave if the master had sexual relations with the slave, something that no Southern State had ever done.
Rowan was primarily referring to the miscegenation that took place since Negro slavery in the Americas. Rape of slaves by white “masters” and their male relatives was common. In addition there have been interracial romantic relationships from the time Blacks were first in America. These have increased dramatically in the 20th and 21st centuries. However, he was slightly in error as he did not consider the origin of man, where science has traced the DNA of EVERY human on Earth back to a Black African female. Hence 100 percent of humans have “Negroid” blood in the sense that there has been inter-racial breeding in the past.
There was a huge amount of racial interbreeding during the early slavery times of America. Some was consensual as people will be people, but much was the rape of Black slaves my white masters—a concept that was never considered rape by law as one cannot commit a crime against one’s own property. The result after time was every possible combination of white/black mixture. There were names for many of the combinations: Quadroons were one fourth Negro. Octaroons, one-eighth. During and after reconstruction, for purposes of discriminatory law, who was a Negro? The Louisiana “one drop rule” said that if there was ANY trace of Negro ancestry, that person was a Negro and would be discriminated against. Of course, what would happen was that many mixed race children were light skinned and looked white and many were black and all shades in between. It was relatively easy for the lighter skinned “one drop” Negroes to pass as white especially if the left the state. But if anyone accused them of being Negro, they would have been guilty of committing crimes. Some in modern times have little comprehension of how the white plantation slave owners and other whitrd could condemn their own children to a second class life of vicious discrimination, but that is exactly what they did. The great irony here lies with the modern KKK, Nazi, and other White Supremacy Groups. They still hold to the “one drip rule for their viciousness. However, under the one drop rule, almost all of them would be Negroes if they went back far enough, and ALL ARE BLACK under the one drop rule as with modern DNA and genetic analysis, we now know that every human alive today emanated from a Black woman in Africa.
It was indeed the first government that was ever founded on that fallacious principle. In retrospect, it was amazing that more Southerners did not question why no other government in the history of the world based a society on that principle. The Southern hubris was a great failing for them.
Nott, a Southerner who owned slaves, was not only an apologist for slavery as this quotation illustrates, but also wrote on his theories of race. Nott was one of the writers about race that Darwin singled out as being completely wrong in 1871: The Descent of Man.
Johnson had a white mistress who accompanied him visibly at a time when Blacks were lynched for dating white women in many parts of the country. He was criticized heavily by whites for going with a white woman and many Blacks for the same.
John Mercer Langston was an American abolitionist, attorney, educator, activist, diplomat, and politician. An African American, he became the first dean of the law school at Howard University and helped create the department. He was the first president of what is now Virginia State University, a historically black college.
