It also comes from early motion pictures and fictional accounts written by prejudiced early American authors.  Jane.

-----Original Message-----
>From: Paul Heinegg <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Jun 24, 2007 1:27 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Topic Picnic and Its Derogatory Commitations along with Negro Barbeques
>
>In response to Glen C. Gregory's post...
>-------
>Those lynchings did not take place without the full support of the white 
>population and reflect the culture of the white population at the time. Did 
>white just become barbarians after the war?
>
>There is a clear connection between the fact that African American slaves
>were merely property prior to the Civil War and the actions of whites 
>towards
>them after the war. More than two hundred years of slavery firmly set this
>concept into white culture--regardless of the myth of "good" slaveowners.
>
>Wasn't it Eugene Genovese who wrote that our ideas about slavery, both North 
>and South, stem mostly from newspapers printed before the Civil War?
>
>I decided to take my own advice and abstract the parts of the wills of
>slaveowners that refer to slaves. I own the two microfilms of the wills
>from Halifax County, North Carolina, from 1758 to 1891, so I will start with
>them. It is not Virginia, but it borders on it and all the families came
>from there. I have so far only abstracted the first hundred pages, but I 
>cannot yet detect any instance in which one could not replace the name of a 
>slave with that of a horse except in those cases where they refer to female 
>slaves as wenches or one master that allowed a slave to choose masters (a 
>talking horse?).
>http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/halifax.htm
>Paul


Lillian Jane Steele