Actual prosperity was
impossible even if the whites had been willing to give the Negro peasants
a fair chance. The South had passed through a disastrous war, the effects
of which so blighted the hopes of its citizens in the economic world that
their land seemed to pass, so to speak, through a dark age. There was then
little to give the man far down when the one to whom he of necessity
looked for employment was in his turn bled by the merchant or the banker
of the larger cities, to whom he had to go for extensive credits.[10]
Southern planters as a class, however, had not much sympathy for the
blacks who had once been their property and the tendency to cheat them
continued, despite the fact that many farmers in the course of time
extricated themselves from the clutches of the loan sharks. There were a
few Negroes who, thanks to the honesty of certain southern gentlemen,
succeeded in acquiring considerable property in spite of their
handicaps.[11] They yielded to the white man's control in politics, when
it seemed that it meant either to abandon that field or die, and devoted
themselves to the accumulation of wealth and the acquisition of education.
This concession, however, did not satisfy the radical whites, as they
thought that the Negro might some day return to power.
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