“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.
And then, when there is a big conundrum gin out to a individual or a nation, it stands to reason that there must be more than one answer to it—or, that is, folks will try to answer it in more than fifty ways.
And anyway, this wuz part of one answer to the conundrum, though folks might be dubersome of its bein’ the right one; anyway, I sez, sez I:
“Hain’t your Southern wimmen of the higher classes high-minded and educated ladies?”