Didn’t Want To Be Free
“Some that didn’t know any better didn’t want to be free. Especially them that had hard taskmasters. When the Nigger was turned loose sho nuff, some of them didn’t have a good shirt to their back. The master hated to lose them so bad, he wouldn’t give them anything.
“But for twenty-five years after slave times, there ain’t no race of people ever traveled as fast as the Nigger did. But when the young ones came up, they are the ones what killed the thing. An old white man said: ‘We thought if you folks kept it up we or you one would have to leave this country. But when the young ones came on, and began begrudging one another this and that and working against one another, then we saw you would never make a nation.’”
Riots and KKK
“I have been in big riots. I was in the Atlanta riots in 1891. We lost about forty men, and I don’t know how many the white folks lost, but they said it was about a hundred. I used to live there. I came here in 1892.
“We had a riot there when the KKK was raising so much Cain. The first Ku Klux wore some kind of hat that went over the man’s head and shoulders and had great big red eyes in it. They broke open my house one night to whip me.
“I was working as a foreman in the shops. One night as I was going home, some men stopped and said ‘Who are you.’ I answered ‘H. B. Holloway.’ Then they said, ‘Well we’ll be over to your house tonight to whip you.’
“I said, ‘We growed up together and you couldn’t whip me then. How you ’spect to do it now. You might kill me, but you can’t beat me.’
“And one of them said, ‘Well we’ll be over to see you at eleven thirty tonight, and we are going to beat you.’
“I went on home end told my wife what had happened. She was afraid and wanted me to leave and take her and the children with her.