Arnett was convicted of violating the state emigration laws regarding the carrying of labour out of the state. He was alleged to have employed thirteen Negroes to work on the Georgia and Atlantic Railroad, which operates in this state and Alabama. The jury on the case returned a verdict of guilty when court convened yesterday, although it had been reported that a mistrial was probable.
“Peg Leg” Williams
A famous railroad emigration agent called “Peg Leg” Williams, who promoted Negro emigration from Georgia to Mississippi and Texas a few years ago, was repeatedly prosecuted and finally driven out of business. In a letter which he wrote some time ago to the Atlanta Constitution he said:
I know of several counties not a hundred miles from Atlanta where it’s more than a man’s life is worth to go in to get Negroes to move to some other state. There are farmers that would not hesitate to shoot their brother were he to come from Mississippi to get “his niggers,” as he calls them, even though he had no contract with them. I know personally numbers of Negro men who have moved West and after accumulating a little, return to get a brother, sister, or an old father or mother, and they were compelled to return without them, their lives being imperilled; they had to leave and leave quick.
In view of such a feeling it may be imagined how futile is the talk of the deportation of the Negro race. What the Southern planter wants to-day is not fewer Negroes but more Negroes—Negroes who will “keep their place.”
Laws to Make the Negro Work
Many other laws have been passed in the Southern states which are designed to keep the Negro on the land, and having him there, to make him work. The contract law, the abuses of which lead to peonage and debt slavery, is an excellent example—which I shall discuss more fully in the next chapter. The criminal laws, the chain-gang system, and the hiring of Negro convicts to private individuals are all, in one way or another, devices to keep the Negro at work on farms, in brick-yards and in mines. The vagrancy laws, not unlike those of the North and excellent in their purpose, are here sometimes executed with great severity. In Alabama the last legislature passed a law under which a Negro arrested for vagrancy must prove that he is not a vagrant. In short, the old rule of law that a man is innocent until proved guilty is here reversed for the Negro so that the burden of proving that he is not guilty of vagrancy rests upon him, not upon the state. The last Alabama legislature also passed a stringent game law, one argument in its favour being that by preventing the Negro from pot-hunting it would force him to work more steadily in the cotton fields.
Race Hatred Versus Economic Necessity
One of the most significant things I saw in the South—and I saw it everywhere—was the way in which the white people were torn between their feeling of race prejudice and their downright economic needs. Hating and fearing the Negro as a race (though often loving individual Negroes), they yet want him to work for them; they can’t get along without him. In one impulse a community will rise to mob Negroes or to drive them out of the country because of Negro crime or Negro vagrancy, or because the Negro is becoming educated, acquiring property and “getting out of his place”; and in the next impulse laws are passed or other remarkable measures taken to keep him at work—because the South can’t get along without him. From the Atlanta Georgian I cut recently a letter which well illustrates the way in which racial hatred clashes with economic necessity.
TROUBLES OF COUNTRY FOLK