The blogger at Those Who Can See has a [re-]
post where he discusses the attitudes of various progressives over time.
Sample:
During Reconstruction, the Reverend Lyman Abbott favored black suffrage and integrated schools and proclaimed that the progress blacks had made since the Civil War had refuted “slavery’s accusations of idleness and incapacity.”
By the 1890s, though,... He characterized blacks as a dependent and inferior people who could rise slowly, if at all, through hard work, improved morality, and industrial education. Nothing alarmed Abbott more than the specter of race-mixing. “For my part,” he announced, “I thoroughly and heartily sympathize with the passionate resolve of the Southern people that this intermarriage shall not go on in their borders. …” (1)
One of Boston’s finest citizens was Charles Francis Adams, Jr. a railroad executive in the Gilded Age, the grandson of the antislavery advocate John Quincy Adams. Adams viewed the Civil War as a humanitarian crusade. A colonel in the United States Army, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., led black cavalry troops into Richmond in 1865.
By 1900, however, the Boston Brahmin’s view of blacks had been transformed. After a trip to Africa, he expressed his complete disillusionment with African Americans in a 1906 article in the Century Magazine. In it, he expressed his regret that Reconstruction had been carried out “in utter ignorance of ethnological law and total disregard of unalterable fact.” At the sight of Africa, he declared, “the scales fell from my eyes.” (1)
Read the rest
there.
