The Project Gutenberg EBook of Black and White, by Timothy Thomas Fortune

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Title: Black and White
Land, Labor, and Politics in the South

Author: Timothy Thomas Fortune

Release Date: October 7, 2005 [EBook #16810]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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BLACK AND WHITE

_LAND, LABOR, and POLITICS in the SOUTH_

By

TIMOTHY THOMAS FORTUNE

1884

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

In discussing the political and industrial problems of the South, I
base my conclusions upon a personal knowledge of the condition of
classes in the South, as well as upon the ample data furnished by
writers who have pursued, in their way, the question before me. That
the colored people of the country will yet achieve an honorable status
in the national industries of thought and activity, I believe, and try
to make plain.

In discussion of the land and labor problem I but pursue the theories
advocated by more able and experienced men, in the attempt to show
that the laboring classes of any country pay all the taxes, in the
last analysis, and that they are systematically victimized by
legislators, corporations and syndicates.

Wealth, unduly centralized, endangers the efficient workings of the
machinery of government. Land monopoly--in the hands of individuals,
corporations or syndicates--is at bottom the prime cause of the
inequalities which obtain; which desolate fertile acres turned over to
vast ranches and into bonanza farms of a thousand acres, where not one
family finds a habitation, where muscle and brain are supplanted by
machinery, and the small farmer is swallowed up and turned into a
tenant or slave. While in large cities thousands upon thousands of
human beings are crowded into narrow quarters where vice festers,
where crime flourishes undeterred, and where death is the most welcome
of all visitors.

The primal purpose in publishing this work is to show that the social
problems in the South are, in the main, the same as those which
afflict every civilized country on the g