As Henry McNeal Turner, a black Republican in Georgia, put it in 1871: “They do not care so much about Congress admitting Negroes to their halls . . . but they do not want the negroes over them at home.” One hundred years later, a black sharecropper in Mississippi would still resort to the most domestic of idioms to describe relations between blacks and whites: “We had to mind them as our children mind us.”26
