WHITES AND BLACKS OR THE QUESTION SETTLED 19,20

CHAPTER III.

THE WHITE MAN AND NEGRO: AS CITIZEN AND CITIZEN.

The right to vote for carries with it the right to be voted for. The colored voter became anxious for office and the cry of “it's not time'' was powerless to hold them back. Then it was that these wily, cunning, political white tricksters got together and said: -'boys our political drift wood, our hobby horses, our stuffed clubs to whale the political life out of Democrats are waking up; they are growing discontented and restless; listen how they howl for gore, spoils and pie of office. We must give them recognition, and this is what we will do:

We will select the least competent from among them and to these we will add a few sharp unscrupulous ones. Their conduct in office will be such as to justly cause wide-spread complaint, and then we will say, now, black boys, you see we told you the truth, -“It's not time."

The result was a number of justices of the peace were elected who could not read their names. Men of color were sent to the

legislature of the State as representatives and senators that

actually could not tell the time of day, and as for being able to write intelligently, very few could answer guilty to the charge. This statement is not made to the discredit of these unfortunate blacks, who literally, like Cincinnati of old, were called from their ploughs to take upon themselves the '-official ermine'* as judges and law-makers for the people; they did the best they knew how, many of them. It is to the shame of the radical Republican dictators, that these truthful statements are made. A colored man, who by hard study and work, was in every

particular, fit to represent the people, would never be selected by them. He would want to stop and read "measures" presented before voting for them; sometime he would disagree with the leaders, and balk their plans; hence it was a part of their duty to see to it, that the intelligent, representative Negroes were kept out of office.

They usually hunted around for some voluble, ignorant black man, who called himself a preacher, and who entertained his audience by sound and tone, appealing to their passion rather than to their reason. Such a black man, who, while preaching, would carry his hand up to his ears and encourage plaintive groaning and melancholy moaning, they would make their leader.

They found him easily nattered; calling him the "smartest negro" in his county or settlement filled him with unspeakable joy. The Negro who voted the Democratic ticket, if it was found out, had to be very careful not to be caught out of reach of a white man, for, if he was, the other Negroes discharged what they felt to be a religious duty, and that was, to give him a severe "thrash-

ing." His mother and father disowned him for such an act; his wife left him, if he was married; if single, his lover refused to receive him; the little black children yelled at him, calling him old "demercrat nigger;" his church turned him out; his preacher consigned him to a lake which burneth with brimstone and fire forever and forever; and more sad than all the rest, though honest he might be, a considerable number of Democrats seemed eager to tell him that they had no confidence in him.

Daniel in the den of lions was in Heaven compared with the place where rested the pioneer Negro Democrat. It is stated that mothers of the Negro race changed the little prayer repeated by their children to read:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I want to be a Republican

If I should die before I wake,

I want to be a Republican.

I pray the Lord my soul to take,

If I have been a Republican

All of which I ask for Jesus' sake,

Because I am a Republican

In England every public entertainment, of every character, high or low, indicates the close or conclusion by singing, "God save the Queen." I think the English could learn a lesson from these parents with black faces. Regardless of this loyalty, the Republican party has been as false to the Negro voters as sheol would be to a powder house within its confines. For more than seventeen years of unswerving devotion and uncompromising loyalty they have paid the Negro rebuffs, insults, inattention,

broken pledges and promises, until today he stands uncovered before the world as the most abject, cowardly cringing, political slave that the world has ever seen.

His schools on every hill, his colleges in every State, one million and a half boys and girls in the school-room, preachers and teachers by the thousands, professional men by the hundreds, mechanics and tradesmen by the car loads, and farmers without number, millions of dollars worth of property, newspapers and inventions; but with all these, still a race of political cowards, quasi foreigners, and, so far as suffrage is concerned, perfect nondescripts or nobodies.

College professors of the race, our prize orators in black, Douglas, Bruce, Langston, Lynch,Smalls, Turner, Scarborough, Pinchback, Smyth, Barnett, Townsend, Gibbs, Straker, Purvis, Cook, Simmons, Crummell, Downing, Page, Price, Crogman, Lee, Mitchell, Arnett, Wilson, Williams, Patty and the hundreds of other distinguished Negroes in this country, all together, don't amount to anything in the councils of the Republican party.

They are used as so many puppets in a side show, setup as targets to be riddled, humiliated, disgraced and destroyed. You must wear the Republican yoke without murmur, or the uncle-zips of the Negro race, will politically kill you, because bidden to do so by the party bosses.

"He who would be free must himself first strike the blow." Ten or a dozen white men, staunch, true and tried Republicans are all you can find in any one of the Southern States. I mean white Republicans who will support a Negro, if he is nominated in a Republican convention. I doubt whether the Southern States will

average over six white men, in each of them, answering to the description just stated. Notwithstanding, the Republican party in each State of the South with not more than one white man to every thousand Negroes in it, is dictated and controlled entirely by the white members. The white Republican boss in Georgia, representing 143,471 black voters by the census of 1880, and about twenty-five white Republicans, himself included to make the number, absolutely controls the whole affair for his party, without having so much as a colored advisorv board.

And the colored citizen filled with cowardice submits, with one white Republican to every 6,000 Negro voters in Georgia, all of whom are professedly, Republicans; the patronage (from Washington under an administration put in by Negro solidity in voting) is given to white men.