Curious Story of a White Man Who Was Expelled as a Negro
Here is a story well illustrating the difficulties sometimes encountered by Southerners in deciding who is white and who is coloured. On March 6, 1907, the Atlanta Georgian published this account of how a man who, it was said, was a Negro passing for a white man, was expelled by a crowd of white men from the town of Albany, Ga.:
Peter Zeigler, a Negro, was last night escorted out of town by a crowd of white men. Zeigler had been here for a month and palmed himself off as a white man. He has been boarding with one of the best white families in the city and has been associating with some of Albany’s best people. A visiting lady recognised him as being a Negro who formerly lived in her city, and her assertion was investigated and found to be correct. Last night he was carried to Forester’s Station, a few miles north of here, and ordered to board an outgoing train.
Zeigler has a fair education and polished manners, and his colour was such that he could easily pass for a white man where he was not known.
Immediately after suffering the indignity of being expelled from Albany, Mr. Zeigler communicated with his friends and relatives, a delegation of whom came from Charleston, Orangeburg, and Summerville, S. C. and proved to the satisfaction of everyone that Mr. Zeigler was, in reality, a white man connected with several old families of South Carolina. Of this return of Mr. Zeigler the Albany Herald says:
The Herald yesterday contained the account of the return to Albany of Peter B. Zeigler, the young man who was forced to leave Albany between suns on the night of March 4th. The young man upon his return was accompanied by a party composed of relatives and influential friends from his native state of South Carolina.
Nothing surely could throw a more vivid light on colour line confusions in the South than this story.
Another extraordinary case is that of Mrs. Elsie Massey, decided in Tipton County, Tenn., after years of litigation, in which one side tried to prove that Mrs. Massey was a Negro, the daughter of a cotton planter named “Ed” Barrow, and a quadroon slave, and the other side tried to prove that she was of pure Caucasian blood. On June 13, 1907, a jury of white men finally declared that Mrs. Massey was white and that she and her children might inherit $250,000 worth of property. Such instances as these, a few among almost innumerable cases, will indicate how difficult it often is to decide who is and who is not a Negro—the definition of Negro here being that used in the South, a person having any Negro blood, no matter how little.
How Many Mulattoes There Are
Few people realise how large a proportion of the so-called Negro race in this country is not really Negro at all, but mulatto or mixed blood, either half white, or quadroon, or octoroon, or some other combination. In the last census (1900) the government gave up the attempt in discouragement of trying to enumerate the mulattoes at all, and counted all persons as Negroes who were so classed in the communities where they resided. The census of 1870 showed that one-eighth (roughly) of the Negro population was mulatto, that of 1890 showed that the proportion had increased to more than one-seventh. But these statistics are confessedly inaccurate: the census report itself says: