Most white Southerners, if directly questioned on the matter, would not have admitted that they held any fear of a slave insurrection. To have done so would have been to deny one of the central tenets of their way of life: that slaves were fundamentally docile and content beings who fully accepted the notion that they were the primary beneficiaries of the "peculiar institution." Southern newspapers, when they addressed rumors of impending slave uprisings at all, generally absolved slaves of responsibility for leading these conspiracies, instead accusing outside agitators—most commonly Northern abolitionists or free African Americans—of being responsible for stirring discontent. Yet the general hysteria that inevitably followed news of an actual attempted rebellion—or even vague rumors of such a plot—demonstrates the self-deception that lay at the heart of this reassuring claim, while private correspondence reveals the depth of concern felt by many Southerners over the slave population's potential to rise up in rebellion.
The Harlem Renaissance was important because, aside from the limited role that a few prominent individuals occupied in public life, the voices of African Americans were largely absent from the cultural and political life of America.
