Black Freedom Quotes
One of the many complaints that many people made at the time about Smith and his Mormons was that they opposed slavery. In fact, Smith not only opposed it be had a plan for compensating the slave owner and a method for paying for it. Smith was not advocating the kinds of personal lifestyle issues of his church the way modern religious leaders do, but was concerned with the much larger issues of expansionism, corruption of the courts and judiciary, and land distribution. He was a classic reform candidate in that sense. Smith had written to most of the then likely Presidential candidates of both major parties asking for their position on the Mormons who were facing persecution wherever they went. None of the politicians would make any satisfactory commitments. Smith took Direct Action and became the only major religious official to have run for the Presidency of the United States until Pat Robertson tried and failed in 2000. Smith’s assassination shortly thereafter cut his run for the Presidency short before it made much headway and politically he had no chance to affect the race.
This marvelous quotation gives us a picture of the essence of the conflict in conception of freedom between Southern whites and negroes. There was no way to change the large majority of whites’ opinions and it is easy to see why Jim Crow and Southern discrimination evolved as it did. The emancipated Blacks had insufficient power or resources and there was not enough effort or success at changing white attitudes and no where near enough law enforcement to impose the view on the majority of the Southern white population.
In early New England the General Court served as both a legislature and a judiciary before separation of powers was introduced. 5 years later the Court banned importing African slaves at all. While slavery was not common in Rhode Island, the laws was not seriously enforced on those who would defy them. It does represent a public anti-slavery sentiment that existed in Early America. It would take 200 years for Rhode Island to finally eliminate all forms of slavery.
The time was the mid 18th Century.
Throughout the Jim Crowe era of the South, the Southern whites were the poorest Americans with the exception of the Blacks, with few economic and cultural opportunities compared with the rest of the nation, the schools were the weakest of any area of the nation, the universities behind, and politically even whites had few choices with single party (Democratic Party) rule. While desegregation was fought tooth and nail by most white Southerners, it had the effect of elevating all phases of Southern life go that the gap between the South and the rest of the country diminished considerably. But the Blacks were also freed from the evil system and that was the “price” to the whites to which Baldwin referred.
