"The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the blacks will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness"
About this Quote
A sentence like this doesn’t argue; it plants a flag. Fortune takes the South’s agricultural calendar - corn tasseling, cotton blooming - and turns it into a clock that never stops ticking. If you want permanence, he implies, look at the land you’ve built your economy on. Black life in the South isn’t a temporary “problem” to be managed, exported, or terrorized into invisibility; it is as enduring as the region’s most mythologized crops.
The intent is confrontational and strategic. Fortune addresses “the white men of the South” in the language they can’t easily dismiss: not moral sentiment, but material fact. Corn and cotton are the South’s old gods, the proof text of its wealth and identity. By tying Black presence to those cycles, he undercuts fantasies of a restored racial order where Black people are either submissive labor or gone altogether. The line forces a choice: accept coexistence and citizenship, or admit that the dream of a lily-white South is as delusional as believing you can stop seasons.
The subtext is sharper: cotton “bloom[s] into whiteness.” Fortune needles the racial symbolism baked into cotton itself - an industry that made “white” wealth by extracting Black labor. The whiteness isn’t innocence; it’s produced.
Context matters. Fortune, a leading Black journalist and civil rights advocate in the post-Reconstruction era, was writing into the rise of Jim Crow, disfranchisement, and racial terror. His rhetoric insists on Black rootedness: not guests, not migrants-in-waiting, but a people as native to the Southern landscape as the crops that once chained them.
The intent is confrontational and strategic. Fortune addresses “the white men of the South” in the language they can’t easily dismiss: not moral sentiment, but material fact. Corn and cotton are the South’s old gods, the proof text of its wealth and identity. By tying Black presence to those cycles, he undercuts fantasies of a restored racial order where Black people are either submissive labor or gone altogether. The line forces a choice: accept coexistence and citizenship, or admit that the dream of a lily-white South is as delusional as believing you can stop seasons.
The subtext is sharper: cotton “bloom[s] into whiteness.” Fortune needles the racial symbolism baked into cotton itself - an industry that made “white” wealth by extracting Black labor. The whiteness isn’t innocence; it’s produced.
Context matters. Fortune, a leading Black journalist and civil rights advocate in the post-Reconstruction era, was writing into the rise of Jim Crow, disfranchisement, and racial terror. His rhetoric insists on Black rootedness: not guests, not migrants-in-waiting, but a people as native to the Southern landscape as the crops that once chained them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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