The Freedmen's Savings Bank

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 175265076X

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-129631

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Fleming, Walter Lynwood http://d-nb.info/gnd/120660560X

Title:: The Freedmen's Savings Bank

Place of publication:: Chapel Hill

Publisher:: Univ. of North Carolina Press

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: x, 170 S.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter VII. The work of the commissioners

Collection:: Economics Books

THE WORK OF COMMISSIONERS 111 were encouraged and invited to trust their millions to its keeping. . . . And now, taking a retrospective glance over the events of the last ten years, in which this Freedmen’s Bank looms up conspicuously, we are led to believe that no race or kindred among all the generations of men have so thor- oughly sounded the depths of the philosophy expressed in the prayer, “save me from my friends,” as those “per- sons lately held in slavery” at the South, a people over whom more crocodile tears have been shed, on whom more imposition practiced, and for whom less real sym- pathy felt by their professed friends, than any other known to history—a people almost literally stabbed under the fifth rib with a hug and a salutation, “How is it with thee today, my brother?” In regard to this bank, the grossest deception was practiced upon them. They were told that it was a Government institution, and its solvency and safety guaranteed by the United States. Missionaries, of whom the chief was Alvord, perambulated the South mixing religion, politics, education, and teaching the blacks how “to toil and to save,” and then trust their hard earned savings to Alvord and his associates to invest them, not until, however, they had levied toll for their services in bestowing such inestimable benefits, and for their dis- interested labors and sacrifices. Full of gratitude to the Government for his emancipa- tion, the Negro was easily approached by and gave un- heeding to any adventurer who declared himself his friend and professed a desire to aid his moral, intellectual, and social elevation, provided he belonged to the party of the administration. He believed and was deceived, trusted and was betrayed. Taught, to his ruin and that of the whites among whom he lives and moves and has his being, and between whom and himself there must be mutual trust and confidence before prosperity can be restored to his section, to hate and distrust the “old master classes,” he is now derided by his old friends for credulity . . . and told that those who dragged him out of slavery have by that one act cancelled every obligation to deal with him on principles of common honesty.

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