Tag: k stephen prince

‘Not to offend,’ but you are ‘profoundly ignorant’ of South

“Boosters made it clear that the New South could not accept Northern attempts to control, define, legislate, or even narrate activities south of the Mason-Dixon line….

“In July 1884, Robert Bingham, a North Carolina educator, appeared before a Washington, D.C., audience, and proceeded to tell the assembled Yankees precisely how little they knew about Southern race relations. ‘I came here to conciliate, not to offend you, but I tell you that the great mass of your people, however much you think you know about it, are profoundly ignorant of the conditions in the South and of the relations between the races.’

“Even as he pleaded for federal aid to Southern education, Bingham held fast to a central New South mantra: When it came to Southern affairs, particularly racial ones, the North was uninformed, unequipped and unprepared. It should, therefore, be uninvolved: ‘Social relations must be left to take care of themselves in the South.’ ”

— From “Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915″ by K. Stephen Prince (2014)

 

Northern readers inundated with Klan outrage stories

“[From its first appearance in 1868] the outrage story, a matter-of-fact newspaper account of Ku Klux Klan violence in the South, remained the most common means by which Northern readers engaged with the Klan….

“A New York Tribune correspondent reporting from Raleigh, North Carolina…had arrived ‘prepared to find that the stories which have reached the North were greatly exaggerated; but the reality seems to be that the one-tenth part has not been told….Take your idea of Ku-Klux outrages. Whip your man or woman half to death, string up your victim to a tree and let him hang for days, bring to mind the worst case of rape you have ever heard of. [Then] multiply these instances by a hundred and throw in every form of torture and cruelty which ingenuity can suggest, with a few thousand lesser whippings which separately count for little, and you will get some idea of the state of affairs in North Carolina.’

“The constant, predictable appearance of [such] stories spoke to the essential deviance of Southern white society. Klan attacks became the raw materials out of which Northerners fashioned an image of a backward, bloody and dangerous South.”

— From “Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915″ by K. Stephen Prince (2014)