The South Has Rights. A Plea
Boston: (S.n.), 1901. Wrappers. Twenty-fourmo. [8] pages.
Rare little pamphlet castigating Theodore Roosevelt for hosting Booker T. Washington at the White House just weeks after becoming President in late 1901.
This racist tone of this piece is surprisingly nasty, coming as it does from a citizen of Boston. Though a native of the city, with family ties to the Boston Post, J. Whitney Beals, Jr. had business interests in the South that must have influenced him. Here is just one of his paragraphs:
-
"What is more sacred than one's family table, and where a breach is committed whereby a negro enters the social circle, it is leading the black race to other social advances, and one would expect to see the races on equal footing at their homes or at the opera; but it would not rest there. The children of the two colors would mingle together at social gatherings, and then the possibility of intermarriage would follow."
-
That such came from a man linked to one of New England’s most respected newspapers underscores how racism was not confined to the South but woven into the cultural fabric of Northern respectability as well, making Beals’s pamphlet a revealing artifact of its moment.
Rare. OCLC notes but a single copy, at Duke.
Very good. Bound in peach-colored printed covers over a saddle-stapled binding. Staples beginning to pull at textblock, a bit of faint scattered foxing inside.
Item #2115
Sold