Originally Posted by canklecat

This blog reproduces some older articles on Major Taylor, including a letter from Taylor to a newspaper asking for fair treatment.

Note that in the letter Taylor claims to be illiterate. I haven't been able to find any information confirming or refuting Taylor's education or literacy. But the letter reads like it was ghost written on Taylor's behalf, with his input. There are some telling phrases, including the ironic quotations around describing himself and his race as the "son of Ham."

If you're familiar with the history of Protestantism, primarily Baptists, in America's deep South and Midwest, you know the implication of that phrase. In many older religious books in early America, through the 1960s, and even from the pulpits, blacks were often referred to as "sons of Ham," a derogatory description based on a theory by racists that black Africans were literal genetic descendants of Ham, the son blamed for "shaming" a drunken Noah. In the most fevered paranoid theories, some who preached a racist doctrine claimed that Ham had castrated the drunken and sleeping Noah so that he'd never produce another rival white son. My ex-father-in-law, a fairly typical Southern Baptist farmer and minister, had a library of older religious books that speculated on these racist themes. To his credit, my ex-FIL disagreed with those theories and I never heard him say anything that could be considered racist. He merely regarded those older books as important to the history of his denomination.