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The Negroes in the conventions were anxious for free schools; the conservatives were willing; but the carpetbaggers and a few mulatto leaders insisted in several States upon mixed schools. Only in Louisiana and South Carolina did the constitutions actually forbid separate schools; in Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Arkansas the question was left open, to the embarrassment of the whites.
The army officers purged the Legislature of Georgia in 1870, that of Alabama in 1872, and that of Louisiana in 1875. In 1875 the city government of Vicksburg and the state government of Louisiana were overturned by the whites, but General Sheridan at once intervened to put back the Negroes and carpetbaggers.
In every convention there was a radical majority with a conservative and all but negligible minority. In South Carolina and Louisiana, there were Negro majorities. In every State except North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, the Negroes and the carpetbaggers together were in the majority over native whites.
Though in but four States South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas were mixed schools the only schools, such an arrangement was understood to be the ultimate goal in several other States. Several of the state superintendents were negroes, and others were carpetbaggers dependent upon negro votes.
But a man never keeps what he himself doesn't earn. He can't. "The children are raised now without manners. When I have to go past Capitol Hill School, I have to get off the sidewalk. Ain't nothin' but these graduates teachin' now, young graduates that don't know nothin' but runnin' about. When I come along, the carpetbaggers were teaching and they knew their business. Mrs.
Many times they have been called upon to escort and protect carpetbag politicians of a very low type of manhood men who could never command one honest vote at their own homes in the North. Faye's company has been moved twenty-one times since we came from Colorado three years ago, and almost every time it was at the request of those unprincipled carpetbaggers.
These considerations had much to do with the return of scalawags to the "white man's party" and the retirement of carpetbaggers from Southern politics. There was no longer anything in it, they said; let the Negro have it! It was under these conditions that the "white man's party" carried the elections in Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas in 1874, and Mississippi in 1875.
Generally the blacks showed no desire for mixed schools unless urged to it by the carpetbaggers. In the South Carolina convention, a mulatto thus argued in favor of mixed schools: "The gentleman from Newberry said he was afraid we were taking a wrong course to remove these prejudices.
If some of them might admit, now and then, among themselves, that the town was unprogressive, or declining, there was always some extraneous reason given the War, the carpetbaggers, the Fifteenth Amendment, the Negroes. Perhaps not one of them had ever quite realised the awful handicap of excuses under which they laboured. Effort was paralysed where failure was so easily explained.
Completely disguised by masks and outlandish dresses, the members rode at night, and whipped, maimed, and even murdered the objects of their wrath, who were either negroes who had become local political leaders, or carpetbaggers, or "scalawags," as the Southern whites who supported the negro cause were called.
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