“2. ‘Social Equality.’ There is no such thing, as the Southerners define it, outside their own imaginations. It is the biggest bugbear that ever frightened respectable minds. If it be a fact that God has made of one blood all mankind, and that Jesus Christ is our common Elder Brother, and we all are, or may be, the children of God, then this caste-mania, which dominates the Southern mind so like an unclean spirit, is something as idiotic as it is unchristian.
“3. ‘Miscegenation.’ It is time, we admit, that Georgia wake up to this evil. She ought to have wakened to it more than a hundred years ago. Atlanta University is not the offender. Had the principles of that school always been regnant in Georgia, there never would have been the evil. Georgians themselves are the sinners. Their witnesses walk before them and are seen every day. A hundred thousand light-colored negroes in Georgia proclaim a hundred thousand white transgressions. It is high time Georgia awoke on the subject of miscegenation. A colored transgressor is quickly strung up to a tree. Why not hang the white transgressor? A few hundred ‘white’ hangings would wonderfully clear up the moral atmosphere down there and get things in good shape for a thorough-going, anti-miscegenation law. Now that Georgia forces herself under the gaze of the civilized world through this action of her Legislature, the decent opinion of mankind calls on them to put a stop to this wickedness within her borders. Make every colored woman who gives birth to a light-colored child disclose the father, and then hang him. Enforce this law as faithfully against the offender of one color as the offender of the other. It is always well to shoot in the direction of the game.
“4. ‘Miscegenation of Ideas.’ The sagacious patriots of the Georgia Legislature speak of ‘miscegenation of ideas’ as something particularly horrible; something almost as bad as the other kind. What they mean by this they do not explain; should they attempt to explain it, all the world outside the white South would laugh them to scorn. They will themselves live to grow ashamed of it. It is too stupid to awaken any mirth, too ridiculous for sober answer, too essentially mean in the spirit and motive of it for anything but contempt and pity. That such a measure as this chain-gang law for Christian teachers could be received with such favor in a State like Georgia, is one of the most dismal signs of the time, or rather signs of the place, that has come to light during the past ten years. But it will fail; yet the curse and stigma of it will long remain to plague those in that State who have any moral sensibility left.
“At the bottom of this miserable and cruel caste-prejudice is jealousy—jealousy of the rising colored man.”
THE CHAIN-GANG.
It is a singular coincidence that this very Legislature, whose lower house has passed this bill to punish Christian teachers for allowing their own children to recite with colored children in the class-room by putting them into the chain-gang, is by a committee investigating the State penitentiary system, pronounced by competent prison reformers to be “perhaps the vilest on earth.” There are some good people in Georgia who want to see the barbarous system exposed and abolished. On the other hand, the supporters of the system are numerous and influential. The Georgia papers do not have much to say about this subject, and probably for the same reason that Russia don’t want the civilized world to know about what is going on in Siberia. The people are afraid to have their deeds of darkness brought to the light, but they are not all silent.
An Atlanta correspondent of the New York World, writing under date of July 22d, describes the system as follows:
“The convicts of Georgia, numbering about sixteen hundred, the negroes largely predominating over the whites, are confined in no regular penitentiary. They are worked under State direction and control, but are divided into three companies, known as “Penitentiary Company No. 1,” etc. These companies take all the convicts under a twenty years’ lease, the good, bad and indifferent. The Lease Act originally prescribed certain work that these convicts should do, the intention being to so regulate their employment as to prevent them from being brought into competition with free labor. Now, however, there is no class of work that the convicts are not called upon to do. They work on railroads and in coal mines; they cut pine timber for the saw mills; they are employed about the mills in those places where skilled workmen are generally employed; they make brick; they operate iron furnaces; they constitute the labor in various manufactories; they work upon plantations, and in every possible way they compete in every industry with free labor.
“The lessees of the convicts change from time to time, men selling their interest in the lease just as they would dispose of their property in anything else. The lessees to-day are not wholly and entirely the same lessees as operated the system at the beginning. Senator Joseph E. Brown is one of the few original lessees who still holds his interests. The changes have been many and various, and so are the stories of outrages. Several years ago children began to make their appearance in the penitentiary, not because of any due process of law, but because of shocking immoralities on the part of lessees and their subordinates. In one camp where the principal lessee was a man named Alexander, since dead, these scandals mostly originated. It was a difficult thing to substantiate the charges, and the Legislature never made any investigation. There were no white women in the penitentiary in Georgia at the time, and perhaps the affair alluded to was not so shocking to public opinion as it would otherwise have been.
“To-day there is only one white woman in the penitentiary in this State. She is confined at the camp of the Chattahoochee Brick Company, Penitentiary Company No. 3, about six miles from this city. This poor woman, weak in intellect, untutored and unfamiliar with the wickedness of the camps, has to be locked up and kept in close confinement day and night, to prevent her being ruined. Since the Legislature has shown a disposition to look into these matters, the lessees of the camp at the brickyard have given the strictest orders about this woman. Her door is constantly locked and the key kept by the good wife of the principal boss, who allows no man to cross her threshold, ‘Great heavens!’ ejaculated a member of the House, when this circumstance was told him, ‘what sort of a system must this be when such measures have to be devised?’”