The Times Dispatch’s Blunder

The Planet claims that the Richmond Times Dispatch needs to stop discussing black people as if the white people are “well versed in all of the practices and habits of all kinds of Negroes.”

The Richmond, Va. Times-Dispatch seems never to tire of discussing some phase of the Negro question and from the tone of some of its editorials one would think that it has its information first hand and was well versed in all of the practices and habits of all kinds of Negroes. As a matter of fact the average white man hereabouts does not know any more about the inner life of the better class of Negroes than do the white men of the North.
He has no means of knowing for he has shut himself up within his own cocoon, so to speak. He is constantly enacting laws to keep the better class of Negroes from coming in contact with him. He refuses as a rule to listen to an address by a Negro and he must therefore glean all information from the servant class that he may have about him. Of course the better class of white people have the better, self respecting servant class. The lower or medium class emplot any Negro woman or man they can find. If the servant spends the night in riotous living in the slums of the city and reports on time or even after time in the morning, it is all right with this class of employers.
Many of these kind of people are shipped North too, much to the disgust of the self-respecting Negro servants, who persistently refuse to associate with them.

“The Times Dispatch’s Blunder,” Black Virginia: The Richmond Planet, 1894-1909, accessed April 24, 2025, https://blackvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/682.