“They can’t read nor write, nor understand an intelligible remark hardly; and yet these are the men that you want to have vote and get put in as rulers over us.
“Well, we will not submit to it, that is all there is about it; and if war comes, the sooner the better, for we will die fighting for our freedom. It is bad enough for us Southerners to be ruled by Northern men, but when it comes to being ruled by beasts, animals that are no higher than brutes, we will not submit.”
Sez I, for I would speak up, and I did:
“Hain’t there plenty of intelligent educated colored people now, graduates of schools and colleges—lawyers, teachers, ministers, etc., etc.?”
“Oh, yes, a few,” he admitted reluctantly.
I knew there wuz a hundred thousand of ’em, if there wuz one.
And I sez, “Hain’t the condition of your poor whites here in the South about as bad as the negroes, mentally and morally and physically?”
“Well, yes,” he admitted that it wuz. “But,” sez he, “that don’t alter the dangerous state of affairs. The interests of a community cannot be placed in the hands of an ignorant, vicious rabble without terrible peril and danger. And when it is too late the country will awake to this truth.”
His axent wuz very skairful, and reproachful, and rebukin’, and despairin’, and everything. And so, thinkses I, I will ventilate some of them views that had gone through my mind when I first begin to muse on the Race Problem, before I had heard so much of Victor and Genieve’s talk and Cousin John Richards’es.
Thinkses I, “It won’t do no hurt to promulgate ’em anyway,” for I truly felt that if they wouldn’t do no good, they wouldn’t be apt to do no hurt.