A Rejection of Anti-Black Rhetoric
The Fairhaven Herald takes a rare, strong public stance against a neighboring editor's racist call for colonization.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
E. White, editor of the Sumner Herald, does himself great discredit in the authorship of such a paragraph as this: 'Tuesday at Ellensburgh was a hard day on shades. One negro, Richard Anderson, was sentenced to be hanged on the 3rd of May, while another, 'coon' James Macaffee, was sentenced to pass twenty years in the state penitentiary. These rulings are just and right, and the few 'nigger lovers' who are desirous of colonizing Washington with blacks will do well to pause and reflect. Keep your 'niggers' in the south.' White is himself from Florida, and as this grand state of Washington is as free to the negro as it is to anybody else, and as that race has, by the laws of the country, the same civil rights as other people, there will be those who will intimate that he ought to have been kept in the south himself. He carries democracy too far, also the 'solid south.'
“As this grand state of Washington is as free to the negro as it is to anybody else, and as that race has, by the laws of the country, the same civil rights as other people.”
While the Herald's rhetoric is of its era, its public denunciation of White's white supremacist agitation provides a vital record of the pushback against the anti-Black exclusion movements that marked the PNW during the late 19th century.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.