Southern Thoughts For Northern Thinkers

Southern Thoughts For Northern Thinkers

Author: Jeannette Robinson Murphy

Year: 1904

Disclaimer! This text is presented here as a historical document. It might seem hard to believe once you start reading, but I think the author had good intentions in writing and delivering these speeches and essays. To a current reader, they'll range from humorously misguided to shockingly racist, but they faithfully represent the mind of a white woman at the turn of the century trying to communicate black culture and lore to a white audience. Jeannette Robinson Murphy was a writer, speaker, and musician. She was born in Louisville KY in 1865 and died in Haywood County, NC in 1946. I'm putting this online because I'm her great-great grandson, and think her work is interesting and important, even if it's pretty offensive now. Southern Thoughts for Northern Thinkers was published in 1904, and includes JRM's writing up to this point (from ~1898). In her own words, the collection was written and published in order to "unify the North and South". One of her main goals was to give northern intellectuals perspective into the complex racial politics of the post-war south. When she speaks of "the Negro problem", she's addressing the cultural assimilation of freed blacks into a unified (but