Freedom Failed: The Reality of Quitman County (GA)

Georgia

“The result of many years of experience, observation, and reflection, has also established in my mind the conviction that the subjection of the negro to the white race is in conformity with the designs of Providence, that slavery is the natural, and, of course, the best condition of the negro, and that this social institution, so far from being an evil, moral, social, or political, is beneficial to both races, and has been, and is now, a chief element of the wealth, prosperity, and power of these United States.”
– Gov. John A. Quitman of Mississippi

Inspired by Charles Darwin’s voyages on the H.M.S. Beagle, I have continued my investigation of the negro in “free society” by touring Georgetown in Quitman County (GA), which is adjacent to Randolph County (GA) and shares a border with Alabama on the Chattahoochee River.

It has been 147 years since the abolition of slavery in West Central Georgia and 47 years since the Voting Rights Act removed the last vestiges of Jim Crow in Quitman County. Here the negro now enjoys unfettered freedom. Here the negro has been elevated to equality with Whites. The law has been reformed to his advantage by outlawing all the formal barriers of prejudice that are thought to hold back his advancement.

In compliance with Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) and the federal court order mandating desegregation of Georgia public schools (1970), the public schools of Quitman County (GA) were integrated. Under the Voting Rights Act, the negro has been given the right to vote, which resulted in Barack Hussein Obama carrying Quitman County (GA) with 53.6 percent of the vote in the 2008 presidential election.

According to the 2010 census, there are 2,513 people in Quitman County (GA). African-Americans are 47.9 percent of the population. There are about 973 people in Georgetown which is the county seat and the only incorporated city in Quitman County (GA). 60 percent of the people who live in Georgetown are African-American.

It is quite clear from touring Quitman County (GA) and Randolph County (GA) that the indigenous Southern institutions like slavery and segregation have been successfully eliminated. American civilization in West Central Georgia has been reconstructed on the basis of Northern ideas and principles like abolition and integration.

We can verify through observation the existence of a free market economy, a welfare state, integrated public education, the integration of public accommodations, black voting rights, and the like. This is the way that the Northerners who supported the Civil Rights Movement thought Quitman County (GA) ought to be. And thanks to the United States Congress, MLK’s Dream has come true in this area.

So what is the result? How did these ideas and policies work out in practice? These are questions which the Mainstream Media will never investigate for ideological reasons.

You can watch “Eyes on the Prize” or “Soundtrack for a Revolution” or “Freedom Riders” on the BRA Experience on PBS without any followup on the institutionalization of the Civil Rights Movement over the course of 47 years. As is often the case with leftwing utopian experiments, the revolution is more titillating than the bleak world that is created in their aftermath.

In my tour of Quitman County (GA) (see photo gallery), I counted and observed 7 gas stations, 1 Dollar General, 1 scrap metal business, 1 liquor store, 1 title pawn store, 2 cash advance stores, numerous abandoned homes, several destroyed homes, several decaying neighborhoods, and undeveloped lakefront property. I was able to confirm though that the main drag in town has been renamed “Martin Luther King, Jr. Bypass.”

Two oddities stood out in Quitman County (GA):

(1) How can such a small county and even smaller town sustain no less than 7 gas stations? The most plausible explanation seems to be that African-Americans from Alabama are crossing Lake Walter F. George to play the Georgia Lottery.

(2) How come there are no fine Antebellum homes on par with those in neighboring Randolph County? It turns out that Georgetown was burnt to the ground by a fire in 1903.

The Iron Law of Race Relations was sufficient to explain everything else that I observed: specifically, the peculiar nature of the Black Undertow economy, the average per capita income of $13,642, the 31.6 percent poverty rate, the chronic underdevelopment of such a scenic lakefront location, and the blighted neighborhoods which are decaying as a result of the Africanization process which drives down property values and pushes out industrious and responsible homeowners.

In 2009, 35 percent of African-Americans in Quitman County (GA) were living off the EBT card. This is almost identical to Randolph County (GA) where 33 percent of African-Americans were on the EBT card. Although we have no precise figures to go by, we can make an educated guess that at least 50 percent of African-Americans in these two counties are now under the EBT card which would be consistent with the explosion of food stamp usage under the Obama administration.

Quitman County High School has a black principal. 75 percent of students are African-American and 25 percent are White. There are four blacks on the Quitman County Board of Education. The Quitman County Commission appears to be predominantly black from Google image searches. Georgetown doesn’t have a mayor.

In Quitman County High School, 26 percent of African-Americans and 10 percent of Whites failed 9th Grade Literature, 18 percent of African-Americans and 7 percent of Whites failed American literature, 54 percent of African-Americans and 27 percent of Whites failed Mathematics I, 59 percent of African-Americans and 30 percent of Whites failed Mathematics II, 46 percent of African-Americans and 18 percent of Whites failed Biology, 49 percent of African-Americans and 24 percent of Whites failed U.S. History, 28 percent of African-Americans and 14 percent of Whites failed Physical Science, and 34 percent of African-Americans and 28 percent of Whites failed Economics in the 2010-2011 school year.

The Whites who are forced to attend Quitman County High School are not a representative sample of the Whites who live in the area. As is the case everywhere in the Black Belt, the middle class and upper class families who can afford to do so pay taxes to support the Black Undertow public school and pay tuition to send their own children to a predominantly White private school.

The Visible Black Hand of Economics has sculpted the peculiar nature of the Black Undertow economy in Quitman County (GA) and Randolph County (GA). Perhaps even more significant though is the “Visible Black Cloud” which casts a dark shadow over West Central Georgia.

The “Visible Black Cloud” is what deters Whites from moving into Quitman County (GA) and Randolph County (GA). They can see the blackness of the region and the corresponding Africanized neighborhoods and the nature of Quitman County High School and Randolph Clay High School (which failed to make AYP), and the uninviting nature of the Black Undertow economy.

They quietly skip over the region, fail to settle there, fail to buy property there, fail to start businesses there, fail to reproduce there and create more virtuous productive citizens which creates the feedback loop of “progress.” The result is poverty, ignorance, and unemployment in these two counties. The result is that the Whites who are born there leave Quitman County (GA) to find employment elsewhere.

I don’t want to come across as someone who is ragging on the White people of Quitman County (GA) and Randolph County (GA). The people who live there are entirely blameless in the tragedy that has befallen the region. The federal government has created this problem by taking freedom and self government away from Whites in the name of promoting democracy and equality for African-Americans.

In 1860, 46.4 percent of the population of Quitman County (GA) and 46.7 percent of the population of Randolph County (GA) were slaves. Of the 333 free families in Quitman County (GA), 167 were slaveholders. Of the 907 free families in Randolph County (GA), 434 were slaveholders.

As we have already seen, the average antebellum slave was worth $134,000 dollars in 2009 dollars. In 1860, roughly half the White families in Quitman County (GA) and Randolph County (GA) were slaveowners. Thus, the average White slaveowner who owned just one slave in 1860 would have had an asset worth $134,000 in a county which in 2012 has an average per capita income of $13,632 dollars.

Quitman County (GA) was named after the Mississippi fire eater and secessionist Gov. John A. Quitman who was widely admired in Antebellum Georgia. A New Yorker by birth and a Southern man by the Grace of God (his home Monmouth in Natchez projects power and masculinity), Quitman is most well known for leading and financing the filibusters who attempted to acquire Cuba in the 1850s.

“I believe that the institution of negro slavery is not only right and proper, but the natural and normal condition of the superior and inferior races when in contact; that, as the chief element of our country’s prosperity, it constitutes a great interest, which is entitled, like other great interests, to the fostering care and protection of the federal government, within the sphere of its powers; that legislation directly or indirectly hostile to this interest, is at war with our compact of union, and should be resisted by the states and the people affected by it at all hazards; that the preservation of the institution of slavery in Cuba, which can only be affected by her independence and malign separation from the malign influence of European governments is essential to the safety and preservation of our own system; that our government ought not to thwart, but to encourage, by all proper means, the diffusion of American republican institutions on this continent; that it is consistent with the designs of Providence, and our right and duty not to restrain, but to encourage the Caucasian White race to carry humanity, civilization, and progress to the rich and fertile countries south of us, which now, in the occupation of mixed and inferior races, lie undeveloped and useless …

The people of Cuba, belong to the pure White Caucasian race, and descended from the best blood of the old Hidalgos, have displayed, in their hostility to Spanish misrule, a unanimity unequaled in the annals of revolution. …

In glancing at San Domingo we see a strange and grotesque power, under whose stupid sway that fair island, holding, with her commodious ports, the same relation to the Caribbean sea that Cuba holds to the Gulf of Mexico, is fast relapsing into barbarism. This caricature of government is sustained by mighty European influences in its attempt to exterminate the small white Dominican republic which still retains a portion of the island.”

147 years after the abolition of slavery, The Reality of Quitman County (GA) shows that John A. Quitman was absolutely right. Freedom failed … and the social and economic cost of freedom is absolutely staggering when you consider the fact that over 35 percent of the African-American population of Quitman County (GA) is sustained by the EBT card and the average single black woman in America has a net worth of $5 dollars.

The DWLs like Brooks D. Simpson who brought us abolition and integration have succeeded all right. They have succeeded in creating and sustaining an American version of Haiti or Congo in our midst. They have succeeded in undermining liberty and holding back the progress of civilization because they are wedded to delusional fantasies about “equality” which have no correspondence to reality.

Quitman County (GA) would be infinitely better off if the people who live there were allowed to shake off this yoke.

Note: In defense of the free negro, I have established that the local black population have been making contributions to the fine arts with odes to the local drug dealers who stand on the corner of South Street in Georgetown.