Frederick Douglass wrote about the origin of the “Color Line” that separated the races and legislated inequality in 1881. The Color Line was not a natural divide, but an invidious division created to justify slavery and persisted through Jim Crow. I thought this passage approriate for Martin Luther King Day:
“… the slave master had a direct interest in discrediting the personality of those he held as property. Every man who had a thousand dollars so invested had a thousand reasons for painting the black man as fit only for slavery. Having made him the companion of horses and mules, he naturally sought to justify himself by assuming that the negro was not much better than a mule.
The holders of twenty hundred million dollars’ worth of property in human chattels procured the means of influencing press, pulpit, and politician, and through these instrumentalities they belittled our virtues and magnified our vices, and have made us odious in the eyes of the world. Slavery had the power at one time to make and unmake Presidents, to construe the law, and dictate the policy, set the fashion in national manners and customs, interpret the Bible, and control the church; and, naturally enough, the old masters set themselves up as much too high as they set the manhood of the negro too low. Out of the depths of slavery has come this prejudice and this color line. It is broad enough and black enough to explain all the malign influences which assail the newly emancipated millions to-day…”
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS, “The Color Line,” 1881.
You can read the entire article The Color Line from North American Review here.
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