The second danger is for the people of Alabama

Alabama faces deuce problems regarding race relations. One is tiring of the work just as the light-haired girl in the old joke, who swims half- charge across a lake, declares she is too timeworn to make it all the way, and then swims back to the side she started on. If the residents of Alabama heighten tired of progressing, they too, might someday end up back where they started. The roil of generations, then, would be wasted.The second danger is for the people of Alabama to believe that equal progress has been do. It is easy to think of unrivaleds own generation as the almost advanced in all of time. Yet, a look back at history shows that previous generations felt the same way. An examination of the attitudes and actions of the progressives in the other(prenominal) sheds some light on how furthermost Alabama has come and how far it might still need to go.Many people today portray buckle down masters as wicked, violent men, who beat their break ones backs constantly and ne glected their needs. This is non a completely accurate picture. Indeed, former Alabama striver Alice Gastoni (Gaston, 1941, p. 1) in a 1941 interview with Robert Sonkin the followingAll the white folks that pick out me, they treats me nice. And if I want anything, Ill ask for it. I was taught in that a way by my old master. Dont steal, dont lie, and if you want anything, ask for it. Be honest in what you get. That was what I was raised up with. And Im that a way today.Another former slave, Isom Moseley in addition said that hed worked for, might good white folks. (Moseley, 1941) He remembered the white people having shoes for the children and the elderly. Similarly, former slave Joe MacDonald recalled that his master had made sure he was educated, so that he would be interact come up by other white people, once the master and his wife had died and gone(p) to heaven. (MacDonald, 1940)One slave owner fathered a child by a drear woman. Instead of denying his paternity, James T. Rapiers father acknowledged him and hired a private tutor to educate him in secret, because Alabama law, at the time, did not allow blacks to be educated.ii Rapier elected to the forty-third sexual congress in 1873 as a republican.Yet, in some parts of the state, slaves were treated very badly particularly in the earliest years. In 1824, slaves in capital of Alabama outnumbered whites. Around half of Alabamas heads of household were slave owners.As the number of slaves in Alabama increased, so did per capita wealth. Indeed, in 1930, per capita wealth was $700, which was quaint by any other part of the country.1 These pointors lead many whites to attention black insurrection. If Alabama blacks rose up against whites, the outnumbered whites might not be able to stop them.Therefore, many solicitudeed for their lives. Others feared losing their fortunes. If blacks were freed, once great southerners would have to postulate with industrialized northerner families in the American e conomy. It would be extremely hard for them to compete. iiiWhite fear lead to increased oppression. While, for a time, there were free blacks in Alabama, the politics chased them out in 1839. An article from The bare-ass-Yorker in 1839 declares, By a law of the last session of the Alabama legislature, all free persons of pretension who remain in the state after the 1st of August close are to be enslaved.ivIf a similar ruling were made today, the paper editors would call for public outrage. In 1839, the note is simply followed by a warning about yellow fever in New Orleans. Clearly, neither the government, nor the media thought of blacks as equals.Yet, while the Alabama legislature tried to unblock the state of free blacks, it also ruled, in 1852, that owners must properly garment their slaves. According to Mary Jenkins Schwartz, however, the law was not enforced and frequently broken.v Jenkins states that because owners would not follow the law, slaves who had children had a difficult time keeping their children warm. Indeed, she says, on one Alabama grove, mothers would cut holes in gunny sacks to clothe their sons and daughters.viSlaves were treated on many plantations as animals. Jenkins reports that many slept on hay. Children were given blankets of inferior lumber and expected to share with one another. Children who did not work in the field on one plantation, were not given food allowances.Therefore their parents would have to pick up animals like rabbits and raccoons to feed them. Indeed, says Jenkins, some children would look forward to working in the fields because they would be able to earn food for themselves to stop their hunger.viiThe fact that plantation owners thought of slaves just as people think of animals is also evinced by a number of documents from Alabama in the 1800s. For instance, in 1852, a Parks Landing plantation owner offered a reward of fifty dollar bill dollars for the return of his runaway slave, Stephen. It reads lik e a lost pet poster. The plantation owner describes his slave as, A fine looking negro who is surrounded by twenty-five and thirty years of age, about six-feet high, copper-colored, with a high fore-head. viii1 Jenkins reports that slave owners would use this to tempt slaves into putting their children to work in the fields. Those who did would receive, one habilitate apiece. One boy, who worked carrying water for workers, earned a shirt, two pairs of pantaloons and shoes.i Alice Gaston. Interview with Alice Gaston, Gees Bend, Alabama, Voices of Slavery. library of Congress. Washington, D.C. 1941. ii Eugene Feldman. James T. Rapier, Negro Congressman from Alabama, The Phylon Quarterly. Vol 19. No. 3 1958. iii Clayton W. Williams Early Ante-Bellum Montgomery A Black-Belt Constituency, The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 7, No. 4. Nov. 1941. iv Free Negroes in Alabama, The New Yorker. Sep. 14, 1839 7 26. P. 411v Mary Jenkins Scwartz. Born in Bondage Growing up Enslaved in the Antebellum South. (Harvard Harvard University Press, 2000). viii Levi Parks. Poster offering fifty dollars reward for the bewilder of a runaway slave Stephen, American Memory. Library of Congress. Washington, D.C. 1852.