In this connection it is well to remark that
kindness will win in the long run with the Negro Race, and make them
the white man's friend. Georgia and those States where Negroes are
being burned are sowing to the wind and will ere long reap the
whirlwind in the matter of race hatred. Criminal assaults were not
characteristic of the Negro in the days of slavery, because as a rule
there was friendship between master and slave-the slave was too fond
of his master's family but to do otherwise than protect it; but the
situation is changed-instead of kindness the Negro sees nothing but
rebuff on every hand; he feels himself a hated and despised race
without country or protection anywhere, and the brute-spirit rises in
those, who, by their make-up and training, cannot keep it down-then
follows murder, outrage, rape. It is true that only a few do these
things, but those few are the natural products of the Southern
system of oppression and the wonder is, when the question is viewed
philosophically, that there are so few. The conclusion here reached is
that Georgia will not get rid of her brutes by burning them and taking
the charred embers home as relics, but rather by treating her Negro
population with more kindness and showing them that there is some hope
for Negro citizenship in that State. The Negroes know that white men
have been known to rape colored girls, but that never has there been a
suggestion of lynching or burning for that, and they feel despondent,
for they know the courts are useless in such cases, and this
jug-handle enforcement of lynch law is breeding its own bad fruits on
the Negro race as well as making more brutal the whites.
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