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Albion Tourgée on race relations and white dominance over blacks in An Appeal to Caesar, 1884

Title

Albion Tourgée on race relations and white dominance over blacks in An Appeal to Caesar, 1884

Description

In this excerpt from An Appeal to Caesar Tourgee makes a point to note that the southern feeling of superiority towards African Americans was exhibited in very drastic ways throughout the time surrounding the Civil War. It was not merely something they believed and occasionally expressed, it actually manifested itself through many groups. Tourgee argues about the significance of the Ku Klux Khan in acting as an organization that showed the attitude of white southerners that African Americans should act subservient. Organizations such as the Klu Klux Khan can be utilized as a lens in which to see the active ways that white southerners not only believed they were superior but actually made conscious efforts to get African Americans act as inferior. It is even through the assertion that they know the best way for freedmen to act that the reader can see their level of supremacy. Lastly, this sheds light on the idea that though slavery had been eradicated legally, white southerners still believed they held control over former slaves and in many ways were successful at actually holding power over these individuals.

Creator

Albion Tourgée

Source

Tourgée, Albion. An Appeal to Caesar. New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1884.

Date

1884

Original Format

Book

Text

First there was wholesale slaughter in the open day, like the massacre at New Orleans, when negroes and white men first met in a public capacity to organize a party of which the negro should be a constituent element. Then we had the Ku Klux Klan, composed of the very best of the white people from Virginia to Texas, as its recent historian tells us, organized into a band of regulators to make the colored people " behave themselves," in the old-time sense of the term ; that is, as slaves and inferiors should " behave." Against this and kindred organizations, such as " Rifle-Clubs" and " Bull-Dozers," there was a sullen though unsuccessful resistance

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Citation

Albion Tourgée, Albion Tourgée on race relations and white dominance over blacks in An Appeal to Caesar, 1884, Civil War Era NC, accessed December 31, 2024, https://cwnc.omeka.chass.ncsu.edu/items/show/580.