White Man’s Country
In 1868, the Democratic Convention’s slogan was: “This is a White Man’s Country, Let White Men Rule.” It seems as if things hadn’t changed much in the next 80 years, at least in certain areas of the Deep South. While in the Mississippi Delta, Crawford noted that 500,000 blacks spend their lives in the service of ‘King Cotton.’ He was also told stories of how the whites in the area were casual when discussing the murder of blacks; hardly a surprise since they usually got away scot-free.
Overall, Crawford’s journey reveals countless tales of cruelty and theft perpetrated against black residents of various Deep South counties. In District No. 4 in Madison County, Mississippi, for example, Crawford wrote that the black residents owned 90% of the land in the district, paid 90% of the taxes and had no say in how their tax dollars were spent. While black teachers received $55 to $90 a month (only the principal got the largest amount), the average white teacher received $150.
Crawford was looking forward to taking a dip in the beautiful waters of the Atlantic Ocean towards the end of the journey. However, he was dismayed to discover that blacks were not allowed to swim. If they were caught trying, they were immediately hit with a heavy fine of $50. He concluded his report by saying that blacks in the South don’t hate the white man despite all the injustice they suffer at his hands.
Crawford also discovered that black men were not allowed to defend themselves against an attack by a white man; resistance was akin to signing your death warrant. White men killed blacks for imagined slights and in the vast majority of cases, got away with whatever cruel deeds they performed. By the end of his journey, Crawford stated that he would have hated “the whole damned white race” had he remained a black man in the Deep South for a few more months.
A Hostile Reception
While Sprigle’s account was syndicated and published in most nationwide papers, it remained free of the pages of publications in the South. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette received hundreds of letters, the majority of them negative, from Southerners. Southern papers published rebuttals to Sprigle’s claims. Eventually, he engaged in a nationwide TV debate with an editor of a Mississippi publication.
Sprigle’s life was completely changed by his experiences as a black man in the South, and he admitted that he would never regain the superior white psychology he had before his journey. Sprigle died in 1957, and for a man who achieved so much in his career, he is not as lauded as one might expect.