Two Kinds of Negroes

The Planet tackles the Times’ changing opinion of African Americans alive and post-mortem.

The Richmond, Va., Times thanks to its editorial articles of January 29tn and 39th, 1901, has set the pace or rather provided the rule by which we may determine when a Negro is a gentleman and when he is only a sensible Negro. According to its reasoning, when a Democratic Negro is dead, he becomes a Virginia gentleman and when he is alive, he is a sensible Negro. In speaking of Mr. Walker Howard (colored) it says: “The death of Walker Howard (colored), for many years janitor of the states Capitol, is a public loss. He knew the history of every article of interest in the historic old building and it was his pride as well as his pleasure to describe them in his own inimitable way to visitors and generally to exploit the glories of the commonwealth. He was a romancer as well as a historian and sometimes he made statements which could not be found in the records. But whether in his naratives he drew from the pages of history or from his own imagination, it was all for the glory of Old Virginia. Walker Howard was a good citizen, a true patriot, a staunch Democrat, an old fashioned Virginia gentleman. In life he enjoyed the respect and good will of his fellow citizens and in death he is genuinely lamented.”
So much for that. We can testify to the worth of this colored man of the old school. He was a type of the ante-bellum Negro, who even now exercises so much influence upon the ex-slave owners and are virtually the pets of aristocracy of other days. But Mr. John E. Eppa did not except Mr. Howard from the operations of the “Jim Crow” Car Bill. He classes him with all of the other Negroes, and placed the same restrictions upon the offspring of Walker Howard that he did upon the sorriest Negro jail-bird who appears from time to time in Justice Crutchfield’s court. Moreover the Times has been advocating the disfranchisement of this “old Virginia gentleman.” It has urged the changing of the Constitution of Virginia, the obliteration of the Bill of Rights, and the relegating of this man and his children to a condition of slavery as galling to agree man as slavery itself. But, Walker Howard is dead, and like “the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” so is he when silent forever—“an old Virginia gentleman.” The compliment denied him when he lived is tendered him when he is dead. But enough about Mr. Howard. Now as to the sensible Negro: He is a live citizen of color and has not according to the rule laid down by the Times, reached that stage of greatness, namely: death, where he, too, can be called an old Massachusetts gentleman. But what does the Times say? It announces that this sensible Negro, William H. Thomas, with whom it agrees then disagrees has written a book on, “The American Negro.”
It says: “He is said to be a man of intelligence and culture and his book is referred back to those who have read it in complimentary terms.” Mark you, Walker Howard, the uneducated Negro is a gentlemen and William H Thomas, the educated Negro is a man. This is discrimination in favor of illiteracy with a vengeance. It remarks: “He does not care for the political rights of his race as long as they are unable to make any intelligent use of them. ‘We may easily admit’, he writes, ‘that it was a caricature on manhood suffrage to invest wit civic functions ignorant beings clothed in patches, sleeping in hovels and scarcely one remove in intelligence from their inseparable animal companions of plantation life.’” This is argument against our form of government as much so as it is against the Negro. Washington and the signers of the Declaration contended against England for the very rights and privileges which Mr. Thomas and the Times denounce. There were thousand of ignorant illiterate, white people in the Continental Army who were clothed in patches and who slept in hovels and scarcely one remove in intelligence from their inseparable animal companions of plantation life. The British Generals and the members of Parliament did not fail to say so either. But who could have dared to declare that it was a caricature on manhood suffrage to have invested them civil rights. Moreover, no intelligent Negro has demanded other than that racial discriminations shall not be exercised. If the ignorant white man is to be barred from the exercise of manhood suffrage along with the ignorant black man, there will be no protest from this quarter. But show us a southern state that will do this. They disfranchise the intelligent Negro and admit the ignorant white man to all of the rights of suffrage, and the Times backs them up in his policy. If Mr. Thomas wants his suffrage taken from him, what is he doing in Massachusetts? Why is he not in God forsaken in Louisiana and Mississippi and South Carolina where the Negro gets patches on his knees by supplicating God so often for the amerlioration of his condition? No, position is that any man who is good enough to fight for government is good enough to enjoy all the rights and privileges that its constitution can confer. When the national and state government exempts the Negro from taxation and the liability to military service, then it will be time enough for it to exempt him from the right to vote at the polls. The Times: “To bring this about he [Thomas] would have Republican Administration in Washington distribute the officers among the leading whites of the different localities, selecting those who are naturally in sympathy with Republican sentiments but debarred from expressing them by reason of their of fear of Negro domination. With these for leaders and a steady propaganda for the extension of knowledge and pure religion among his fellow blacks, the author believes that the most serious problem in American government may be slowly and peacefully solved.” The above should fix Mr. Thomas’ statue as a political economist or a student of ethics. He left the domain of principle to tread in the valley of petty politics. Hon. Grover Cleveland adopted this policy of appointments in the south and the so-called race questions was as prominent a factor in public affairs as ever before. This policy is in vogue now in every south of the Mason and Dixon line, with the possible exception of West Virginia. But the Times shows that Mr. Thomas argues not only in favor of his own slavery, but that of his people when it says: “We have never seen a stranger argument from any source for repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment. It was this stupid blunder that got the Negro into trouble and caused the “outrages and miseries of reconstruction,” and as the author of this book says, the Negro was not directly responsible.” It then unloads this sensible Negro by virtually saying he is wrong. It concludes: “but the remedy which he suggests would not be effective. The only way to build up a respectable Republican party in the south is to eliminate, for a time at least, the Negro vote. This in our opinion would be the greatest possible boon to the black man. His right to vote has done him no good, but only harm and he would have been far better off all these years without it.” The argument of Mr. Thomas and these white southerners against the Negro is the same logic used by Great Britain towards its American colonists. Nay more, it is the same advanced against the Boers and by the American authorities against the inhabitants of the Philippines. When we get to that point that we argue in favor of depriving ourselves of rights and privileges and the debasement of the American citizenship which has been conferred, we shall expect some kind friend to cage us and put us in some zoological park where we shall hope to keep company with the Times’ editor and the sensible Negro, Thomas, who had gone on before.

“Two Kinds of Negroes,” Black Virginia: The Richmond Planet, 1894-1909, accessed October 9, 2026, https://blackvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/1017.