I was a playmate to all the niggers, preferring their society to that of the elect, I being a person of low-down tastes from the start, notwithstanding my high birth, and ever ready to forsake the communion of high souls if I could strike anything nearer my grade. - "Jane Lampton Clemens" |
 AI image created by Barbara Schmidt |
| ...on every sin which a colored man commits,
the just white man must make a considerable discount, because of the colored
man's antecedents. The heirs of slavery cannot with any sort of justice,
be required to be as clear and straight and upright as the heirs of ancient
freedom. And besides, whenever a colored man commits an unright action,
upon his head is the guilt of only about one tenth of it, and upon your
heads and mine and the rest of the white race lies fairly and justly the
other nine tenths of the guilt. - Letter to Karl Gerhardt, May 1, 1883 reprinted in Selected Writings of an American Skeptic, Victor Doyno |
Sam Clemens and John T. Lewis |
|
And at the fag-end of the procession was a long double file of the proudest,
happiest scoundrels I saw yesterday--niggers. Or perhaps I should say
"them damned niggers," which is the other name they go by now.
They did all it was in their power to do, poor devils, to modify the prominence
of the contrast between black and white faces which seems so hateful to
their white fellow-creatures, by putting their lightest colored darkies
in the front rank, then glooming down by some unaggravating and nicely
graduated shades of darkness to the fell and dismal blackness of undefiled
and unalloyed niggerdom in the remote extremity of the procession. It
was a fine stroke of strategy--the day was dusty and no man could tell
where the white folks left off and the niggers began. The "damned
naygurs"--this is another descriptive title which has been conferred
upon them by a class of our fellow-citizens who persist, in the most short-sighted
manner, in being on bad terms with them in the face of the fact that they
have got to sing with them in heaven or scorch with them in hell some
day in the most familiar and sociable way, and on a footing of most perfect
equality. The idea of making negroes citizens of the United States was startling
and disagreeable to me, but I have become reconciled to it; and being
reconciled to it, and the ice being broken and the principle established,
I am ready now for all comers. The idea of seeing a Chinaman a citizen
of the United States would have been almost appalling to me a few years
ago, but I suppose I can live through it now. Mrs. Clemens has said a bright thing. A drop letter came to me asking
me to lecture here for a Baptist church debt. I began to rage as usual
over the exceedingly cool wording of the request, when Mrs. Clemens said
"I think I know that church; & if so, this preacher is a colored
man--he doesn't know how to write a polished letter--how should he?" Even if the Jews have not all been geniuses, their general average of
intelligence and intellectuality is far above our general average--and
that is one of our reasons for wishing to drive them out of the higher
forms of business and the professions. It is the swollen envy of pigmy
minds--meanness, injustice. In the case of the Negro it is of course very
different. The majority of us do not like his features, or his color,
and we forget to notice that his heart is often a damned sight better
than ours. Our Civil War was a blot on our history, but not as great a blot as the
buying and selling of Negro souls. The people that's always the most anxious for to hang a nigger that hain't
done just right, is always the very ones that ain't the most anxious to
pay for him when they've got their satisfaction out of him. |
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