The Invisible Line by Daniel J. Sharfstein

Author:Daniel J. Sharfstein [Sharfstein, Daniel J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, History, Biography, Non-Fiction, African American, United States, Discrimination, Race Relations, Adult
ISBN: 9780143120636
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2011-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

THE NEXT DAY, WALL was called back to the committee so that other senators on the panel could question him. Defending his home state, Senator Vance suggested that Wall was wrong about conditions in North Carolina because he did not consult official government reports or “intelligent white men of the State.” The two Republican senators in the minority offered Wall more of an opportunity to attribute the Exodus to “the abuses the colored people have received.” “I think where they are even treated best their treatment is such as to demoralize them and frighten them,” he said.39

After fifty-three days of testimony from dozens of witnesses, the committee’s Democrats reported to the Senate that their initial suspicions had been confirmed: that the motive for “promoting this exodus of the colored people was purely political,” to traffic blacks to “close States in the North, and thus turn the scale in favor of the Republican party.” They found that no racial inequality, mistreatment, or vote suppression existed in the South. “The condition of the colored people of the South is not only as good as could have been reasonably expected,” they reported, “but is better than if large communities were transferred to a colder and more inhospitable climate, thrust into competition with a different system of labor, among strangers who are not accustomed to them, their ways, habits of thought and action, their idiosyncrasies, and their feelings.”40

In reaching their conclusion, the Democrats attacked Wall’s testimony by suggesting that he had received kickbacks from the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad—one dollar for every passenger sent to Indiana. Wall insisted that the “drawbacks” went to buy more tickets, and even witnesses who objected to the Exodus as politically motivated testified that no one profited from the Emigrant Aid Society, which aimed solely “to help men fleeing from oppression.” The sharpest attack on Wall came from W. Calvin Chase, a journalist two years away from starting his influential Negro newspaper The Washington Bee. Chase told the committee that Wall’s “only object was to speculate on the ignorant people of the South.” “I have known him for five or six years,” Chase said, “and I know he never enters into anything except he makes something out of it.” Without mentioning the Freedmen’s Hospital investigation by name, Chase suggested that Wall had a reputation for being “very dishonest” and that “the people in the District have no confidence in him.”41

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