Robert T. Hill denounces efforts for civil rights and federal antilynching laws

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Extract from Dallas Morning News (DMN) article, “Musings, Memories of an Old Timer,” Feb. 19, 1939, page 5. In this article Robert T. Hill expresses his hostility towards efforts to give African Americans civil rights and efforts to pass a federal antilynching legislation.

The Dallas Independent School District (DISD) has a Robert T. Hill Middle School named after him, one of many schools named after racists in the DISD system.

This isn’t the whole article just the section where he expresses his anti-pathy to civil rights. I have it in Old Newspaper font so you can sense it as an artifact from the past. Spellings will be as used in the article.

Warning, language is that commonly used in Dallas in the 1930s and found to be quite acceptable by the DMN.

Jiggered by Jim Crow Acts in Ohio.

Shortly the United States Senate will take up the antilynching bill, and the Northern Senators will begin their annual rantings and misrepresentations about the Jim Crow laws and the alleged mistreatment of the Negroes in the South. Apropos to this occasion the writer on a recent trip saw something as he passed through Ohio.

One may imagine my surprise upon stepping from the front end of the Pullman car into the rear end of the day coach I was rather surprised to see all of the Negro passengers segregated in one end of the car and the white folks at the other, just as upon any ordinary Southern railway or streetcar.

Only the first third of the car was entirely occupied by Negroes while the white people were in the rear. Thus the two races were as if they had been in Texas, and a partition between them, just as if they had been in Dallas street cars, only in reverse order.

Although there is no race separation law in Ohio, it seems that Jim Crow customs exist there by practice as well as by law in the South. I am told that this voluntary separation of the races is also customary in most of the other North-western states.

And while on this subject of the Negroes, it may be said that since the late World War, when so many of the Negro population

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migrated to the North, the so-called Negro problem has passed with them from the South to the North, and our Northern friends are as greatly agitated over it as we Southerners formerly were.

Forty Years in North Forty years of the writer’s life have been spent as an expatriated Southerner among Northerners whose friendship he cherishes almost as the chief treasures which he possesses. While there he never saw the socalled social equality nor the mixture of the races in social or public life, which the pretender friends of the Negro advocate for us.

And while believing, as England does, in giving every civil right to the Negro that the white man receives, I also believe that social rights are matters of individual choosing and not for the state to enact. I cannot refrain from repeating the conclusion of the story which I heard the great typical Virginian

Congressman tell that astute Boston lawyer, Gardner Hubbard, first president of the National Geographic Society, while the latter was on an excursion to the Luray Caves in Virginia. The remark was made by a grayhaired old darky atop of a rail fence as he saw a flock of slaves being conducted down the Shenandoah Valley to a concentration camp ahead ahead of Sheridan’s cavalry, each dejected and disgusted cavalryman of which was carrying a darky baby in his arms in order to relieve the Negro mothers.

“Yah, yah, yah,” the old darky shouted in his glee. “You come for Nigger; youse got Nigger, and I hope youse pleased.”

It is a pity that the antilynch bill should be again raised in Congress this session to keep the smouldering spark of racial and sectional antagonisms aflame. Surely if the Republican party ever expects any votes from the South it will have to stop that kind of stuff.