Friday Dead Racist Blogging: Blasphemy Edition

I wasn't planning on using this quote this week. But since I said "It is kind of amazing to see just how far racist rhetoric goes", I thought I ought to give an example of truly outrageous racist rhetoric.

Tom Watson of Georgia said that the Negro simply has "no comprehension of virtue, honesty, truth, gratitude and principle." The South had "to lynch him occasionally, and flog him, now and then, to keep him from blaspheming the Almighty, by his conduct, on account of his smell and his color." Lynch law was "a good sign"; it showed "that a sense of justice yet lives among the people."

--Thomas Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America, pp. 271-72

Yep. Apparently a Negro's "smell and ... color" are blasphemy.

So much for the black homophobes who declare that comparing civil rights for gays to civil rights for blacks is invalid because "being black isn't a sin."

I also feel I ought to mention that I, truly unfortunately, have been unable to find the original source for this. Gossett cites Tom Watson's Weekly Jeffersonian magazine; unfortunately, the only copies of a Jeffersonian magazine I've been able to find were monthlies, and were apparently entirely about how much Watson hated Catholics (or "papists").