User:Marc Garvey

A Southern Woman's View was written by Corra May Harris and published in the Independent on May 18, 1899. It was written and submitted as a reader's editorial response to the torture and lynching of African-American Sam Hose on April 23, 1899. Corra Harris wrote her essay refuting an editorial published by the Independent's editor-in-chief, William Hayes Ward, that condemned the lynching. The essay was Corra Harris' first nationally published work. The essay was an endorsement of the practice of lynching as a necessary evil. Harris' racial view was rejected by African-Americans and a minority of white citizens as well. The Independent liked her work and asked her for more, launching her writing career.

A Southern Woman's View

By Mrs. L. H. Harris

To The Editor of The Independent: Your paper is regarded by Southern people as an advocate of extreme Northern views, particularly with reference to all negro race problems. We who are not consumed by provincial prejudices read it in order to get a perspective of our methods from an alien point of view. Since the Cranford murder and outrage and since the burning of the criminal by an inhuman mob, this perspective will doubtless be lurid enough for a long time with the bloody flames of that horrid funeral pyre. Yet as a Southern woman I am impressed by the sincerity and dignity of your position. On this account I venture to inform you of facts which do not mitigate the atrocious conduct of the Newnan mob, but which do explain its savage fury. The pioneer in colonial days protected his wife and child from the wild beasts with his gun and knife; but to-day in the South every white woman lives next door to a savage brute who grows more intelligent and more insolent in his outrages every year, against whom the dilettante laws of Georgia and other Southern States offer no protection. The criminal usually becomes a feather in the cap of some smart lawyer if he is “brought to justice,” and after lying in prison long enough to become insane from suspense he is bundled off to the asylum, or at least to the penitentiary for life. In this section of Georgia, which is not far from Palmetto, no white girl, however young, or woman, however old, would be safe alone on the public highway. The farmers do not dare to leave their wives and daughters at home while they are in the fields. The country schools are failures, except in thickly populated districts, because parents will not risk their girls along lonely settlement roads. Even in small towns the husband cannot venture to leave his wife alone for an hour at night. At no time, in no place, is the white woman safe from the insults and assaults of these creatures. This negro brute is a product. The circumstances which bring him into existence are worth considering. He is nearly always a mulatto, or having at least enough white blood in him to replace native humility and cowardice with Caucasian audacity. He is always above the average in intelligence. He is sure to be a bastard, and probably the offspring of a bastard mother. Can such a creature be morally responsible? His lust is a legacy multiplied by generations of brutal ancestors. To the impartial spectator illegitimacy among negroes appears to be on the increase. Their social customs do not condemn this crime by even the mildest form of ostracism. Their churches condone it. The negro father does not practically resent or avenge the seduction of his daughter, nor the brother his sister. The black bride's dowry to her husband is nearly always in the form of a “love child.” And if the child is a girl she becomes in turn the concubine of her stepfather in the course of a very few years. These facts are the rule and not the exception among negroes. This is the genesis of the brute. Could there be any other logical result? You cannot judge these peoplee sitting on a divan in New York, looking at them through stain-glass windows of poetic sentimentality. You must live among them long enough to learn they can in quaintest dialect imitate the highest ideals of thought and character; but the negro never confounds his ideals with the humdrum of his actual existence. The charge has been made that slavery fostered and compelled immorality among slave women. But to-day there is a larger percent of illegitimate children than ever before. In Africa chastity is the unbroken law of many tribes. But the negro is the mongrel of civilization. He has married its vices and he is incapable of imitating its virtues. He is its abortion and at the same time its victim. He is the measure of its strength and he proves its fallacies. He is a horrid demonstration of the fact that civilization by force of merely human laws is the cheapest veneering. He has discarded the innocent nudity of his African ancestors for the fig leaves of conventional apparel; and he has exchanged comparative chastity for brutal lust. His ancient superstitions have only changed into religious forms which have no real influence on his moral life. His religion is merely an emotional and social impulse. Nothing can be more truly said of the ordinary negro than that he is a spiritual hypocrite. The most prominent women in their religious enthusiasms are oftenest public prostitutes. Only yesterday I passed one of the “preaching” to a crowd of men on a street corner, and I assure you her ethics were high, while her gestures were lewd and blasphemous. Out of this cesspool of vice rises that hideous monster, a possible menace to every home in the South. He has the savage nature and the murderous instincts of the wild beast, plus the cunning and lust of a fiend. The education he is receiving only appears to make him a more formidable factor for evil. To him liberty has always meant license of one sort or another. Is it any wonder North Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana have passed laws virtually disfranchising him? The breach between the two races is widening alarmingly. Their children will not reach maturity before a separation must take place. For years the South has been a smoldering volcano, the dark of its quivering nights lighted here and there with the incendiary's torch or pierced through by the cry of some outraged woman. The days are feverish with suppressed excitement and concealed animosities. It is no longer a question of sitting down to meet with publicans and sinners, as our Lord set us the example to follow, but it is the fact of lambs and wolves in one sheepfold. These negro men never can, nor ever could, have been receied at the same fireside with white women. Will you men of the North who mold the sentiment of your people place your sympathies wholly on the side of these brutes, passing with a word over their crimes to bitter denunciation of our avengers? Surely there is not a women in the South who does not regard the action of the Newnan mob with shame and horror. But when you men of the North condemn your brethren here in the usual wholesale manner the negro takes it for granted you are on his side. This cannot be true. I have never before opened my lips on this subject. I do so now on account of a real anxiety. Do my views appear entirely too partisan for publication in your paper? I fear this is the case. Rockmart, Ga.