"Slavery days were hard but in the same time the colored people fared
better than now because the white folks taken up for them and they
raised what they needed to eat. You couldn't go nowhere but what people
had plenty to eat. Now they can't do it.
"I know what caused it too. The Jews didn't have much privilege till
after the Negro was emancipated. They used to kill Jews and bury them in
the woods. But after emancipation, he began to rise. First he began to
lend money on small interest. Then he started another scheme. People
used to not have sense. They went to work and got in with the Southern
white folks and got a law passed about the fences.
"The Greeks and Italians are next to the Jews. They don't make much off
the white man; they make it off the Negro. They come 'round and open up
a place and beg the niggers to come in; and when they get up a little
bit, they shut out the niggers and don't want nothin' but white folks.
It's a good thing they do, too; because if somebody didn't shut the
Negro out, he'd never have anything.
"The slaveholders were hard, but those people who come here from across
the water, they bring our trouble. You can't squeeze as much out of the
poor white as you can out of the darkey. The darkey is spending too much
now--when he can get hold of it. Everywhere you see a darkey with a
home, he's got a government mortgage on it. Some day the government will
start foreclosing and then the darkeys won't have anything, and the
biggest white man won't have much.
"A hundred years from now, they won't be any such thing as Negroes.
There will be just Americans. The white people are mixed up with Greeks,
Germans, and Italians and everything else now. There are mighty few pure
Americans now. There used to be plenty of them right after the War.
"The country can't hold out under this relief system.
"They're sending the young people to school and all like that but they
don't seem to me to have their minds on any industry. They have got to
have backing after they get educated. Now, they'll bring these
foreigners in and use them. In the majority of states now the colored
man ain't no good unless he can get some kind of trade education and can
go into some little business.
"In slavery times, a poor white man was worse off than a nigger. General
Lee said that he was fighting for the benefit of the South, but not for
slavery. He didn't believe in slavery."