It
was the "impudent" assertion of their "rights" that so aggravated
and enraged the people among whom they dwelt. It was not so much
the fact of their having valuable possessions, and being entitled
to pay for their labor, that was deemed such an outrage on the part
of the colored race, but that they should openly and offensively
use those possessions to assert those rights and continually hold
language which only "white men" had a right to use. This was more
than a community, educated as the Southerners had been, could be
expected peaceably to endure.
As a farmer, a champion tobacco-grower and curer, as the most
prosperous man of his race in that section, Horsford was not without
a certain pride in Nimbus; but when he asserted the right of his
people to attend a political meeting without let or hindrance,
losing only from their wages as hirelings the price of the time
thus absent, he was at once marked down as a "dangerous" man. And
when it was noised abroad that he had proposed that all the colored
men of the county should band together to protect themselves against
this evil, as he chose to regard it, he was at once branded not
only as "dangerous" but as a "desperate" and "pestiferous" nigger,
instead of being considered merely "sassy," as theretofore.
So this meeting and its results had the effect to make Nimbus far
more active in political matters than he had ever been before, since
he honestly believed that their rights could only be conserved by
their political co-operation.
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