Posted by stew - Wed, May 3, 2006

Gazette & Courier - Monday, February 8, 1875
Negroes in Washington City

Negroes in Washington City - Every experiment of the continent has been tested in the inoffensive District, which enshrines the government. Here slavery and freedom began the overture of that forever memorable contest which, in the triumph of the black man's fortunes, has added Africa to the Kindergarten of Christendom, and made an ineffaceable element of the American type these voting children of Ham, to compete with us perhaps, in every field, social, missionary, and heroic. The capital city is also the capital of the African race. Here they are relatively stronger in population, influence and property than anywhere among the Caucasian races. They are of all religions, Catholic as well as Protestant. Their university at Washington is an exalted and striking feature in the landscape. They are employed in almost every department and sit in Congress, and up to this time there has never been a public scandal associated with a negro. The tenacity with which they cling to property is one of the most remarkable manifestations in human development, and although degraded, underpinned, taxed and tempted, they hold to their lots and shanties in the fashionable west end of the city, with a prescience and resolution as notable as that of the poor old woman who gave testimony before the Ku Klux committee, saying "They took me out and beat me free times in dat one night wid hickory swathes an put de rope aroun my neck, an said dey was a gwine for to hang me unless I moved off Mr. ____s farm; but gent'men, I wouldn't gib up my property. Anything, says I, ef I can keep my land". Here it may be added that the statesmen of the African race are nearly all resident in Washington, or in frequent council there, headed of course, by one of the first literary minds which Maryland has produced. I mean Frederick Douglass, a native of Caroline County, on the Eastern Shore, whose years have been spared to realize the extremest transformations of human nature. Once a flogged slave with an African mother, he tempted the alphabet, letter by letter, from boys who have played around the shipyard where he was a mechanic; next the pioneer negro on the English http://www.yourdictionary.com/ahd/h/h0335200.html hustings , to plead for American emancipation, and bought and redeemed by the audiences he addressed, finally the guest of an American ship of war, and the editor of a newspaper in Washington; and perhaps greater than all, so self respecting as to prefer the post of private duty rather than move into a Southern State for the sake of a Senatorship (Harpers Magazine).

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