The Gazette

Hon. Joseph C. Manning Says
Southern "Crackers" Talked During the Rioting
"The Attitude of the Afro-American"—Dr. Wm. A. Byrd on "An Insidious Propaganda".

(Mr. Manning was a leader of the Republican-Populist fusion party in Alabama and the South, having been a member of the Alabama Legislature. He is a native Southerner and has made a study of conditions in the South for years.)

Nothing so well serves to distract consideration from the methods and practices of leaders of the Democratic party in the South as agitation against the Negro. To one who has lived in the South, who has taken part in political campaigns, the playing up of stories of alleged assaults and the like, charges of criminality as against colored people, is no new thing. It always occurs in districts or States where any serious effort is made to attack the misrule of the Southern Democracy. Anti-Negro propaganda is the smoke screen behind which the Southern political autocracy hides its lynchings of the rights of all the people. So, it was not difficult for me, an onlooker in Washington, to get to the bottom of the facts behind the recent race riot in the national capital. I was there from July 12 until Aug. 1, and had full opportunity to listen in on conversations and to gather up sentiment. Old-time Southern Democratic sentiment and Southern Democratic methods played the part that brought on the violence. Two men seated themselves at a table in a restaurant opposite where I was sitting. It was Sunday evening, about 11:45, July 27. One remarked to the other: "As I came down the avenue, awhile ago, I saw a gang of fellows seize a little nigger and give him a terrible beating up." Then came the inquiry: "What was he doing?" The reply was: "Nothing, except going along." Whereupon the man making the inquiry said: "Well, that's the way to treat them. That's the way we do it down home. We have simply got to do something to terrorize these Washington niggers to keep them in their place." The conversation of these men soon developed the information that the one was from Georgia who indorsed indiscriminate attack upon all colored people. It was not difficult to understand anywhere in Washington that anti-Negro sentiment, violent in expression, was common on the part of Southerners holding positions in the departments. They deeply resent the idea that colored people should have Government positions. This has been the main feeder to this racial friction in Washington. The assault stories, alleged as bringing about the anti-Negro demonstration, were overworked Southern political propaganda of the "damn a nigger anyhow" variety.

Washington police have wanted a raise in pay; they have wanted more men on the police force; they have agitated for this for months; and, when the propaganda of the Southerners started against the Negro they were not asleep to the possibility that a little trouble would help their cause along. Colored people in Washington feared, and they had good reason to fear, a repetition of the methods employed in the Atlanta riot, when colored people were attacked on every hand, everywhere, even in their homes. My opinion is that precisely this thing would have happened in Washington had not the colored people shown the spirit of resistance that they did show. The mob soon learned that Washington Negroes had made up their minds that they would not die like rats. It got the verdict from the Southern mobocratic jury, the real lesson that the anti-Negro Southern mob in Washington had learned from their experience, when a "black belt" Democrat said to me: "This thing in Washington surprises me. I am astonished at the resistance put up by these Washington niggers. I am no nigger-hater. A nigger is a useful animal in his place. These folk in Washington will have to find some other way to teach these Washington niggers their place. We are going to have trouble in Birmingham with the niggers down there too." The conversation was closed by my remarking that he would find that colored people, South and North, will no longer tamely submit to old-time methods of "terrorizing," and that he had as well count upon it that the colored people in Birmingham would not now die like rats any more than did the Washington Negroes. Who can blame any man for fighting back when he has at the least, come to the conclusion that he has got to die anyway and prefers to make some sort of defense than be beaten to death or shot to death without turning a hand against the mob? This is simply the feeling of the Negro. He has been hounded until he reasons that he has to take his last stand. This riot once hate is too bad. It is shameful and, in most part, it all arises from political buncombe put forward by Northern Democrats that they may "get by" with the rule of a political autocracy—while they shout from the house tops about "world democracy."

The only way to stop this propaganda against the Negro is to tell the nation the truth about the Southern political oligarchy, for it is all kept up to obscure the facts about political repression of whites and blacks alike—Brooklyn (N. Y.) Daily Standard and Union. Aug. 14, '19.