Light Ahead for the Negro

by Edward A. Johnson

“The Negro, turned from the Southern white man’s refusal, followed such leaders as he could find. In some instances these proved to be corrupt camp followers, in others ambitious and unscrupulous Southern men who made the Negroes stepping stones to power or pelf. The Negroes of the state received very little of the honor or harvest of reconstruction, but very much of dishonor, and they are now charged with the sins both of omission and commission of that period. A pliant tool he may have been in the hands of demagogues, yet in the beginning he sought the leadership of wise men. In this he showed a noble purpose which at least relieves him—whatever was charged to his account afterwards—of the charge of malicious intent.

“Here is a list of prominent white leaders in North Carolina who controlled the ship of state for the first ten years after the war, from 1869 to 1876:

“Wm. E. Rodman (Southern white), Judge Dick (Southern white), W. W. Holden, Governor (Southern white), Byron Baffin (Southern white), Henry Martindale (Ohio white), Gen’l Ames (Northern), G. Z. French, legislator (Maine), Dr. Eugene Grissom, Superintendent Insane Asylum Raleigh, North Carolina (Southern white), Tyre York, legislator and party leader (Southern white), Governor Graham (Southern white), Judge Brooks (Southern white), S. J. Carrow (Southern white).

“This list shows that those who had the reins of government in hand were not Negroes. The truth is, that if the team went wrong the fault was that of the white drivers and not that of the Negro passengers who, to say the most, had only a back seat in the wagon of state.

“But the enemies of Negro suffrage and advocates of the mistakes of reconstruction avow that the sway of reconstruction demagoguery could never have prevailed but for Negro suffrage; that had the Negro not been a voter he could never have been made the tool of demagogues. This is obvious but the argument is sufficiently met by the fact that the Negroes offered the brain and culture of the South the opportunity of taking charge of affairs. Instead of doing so they stiffened their necks against Negro suffrage, the Howard Amendment, and the other propositions of the government at Washington, looking towards the reconstruction of the lately seceded states. If there had been less resistance there would have been less friction, but the South had its own ideas of how the thing should be done and resisted any others to the point of a revolution which had to be put down by government troops. The government’s plans were carried finally at the point of the bayonet, when they might have gone through smoothly, had the Negro’s call for Southern leadership been heeded. Had this been done, the ‘Ku-Klux’ would never have developed. The South came back into the Union, ‘overpowered,’ it said, ‘but not conquered.’ So far as the Negro question is concerned that is true but in other matters the South is essentially loyal. Although it came back pledged never to deprive any citizen of his rights and privileges ‘on account of color or previous condition of servitude,’ it is now engaged in a bold and boasting attempt to do this very thing. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia have all adopted amendments to their constitutions which practically nullify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution, which the honor of these states was pledged not to do when they were re-admitted into the Union at the close of the war of secession! In Virginia the amendment was established without submitting the question to the popular vote. To secure these amendments in other states, fraud and intimidation is alleged to have been used, and the Southern states that have not amended their constitutions have effected the same results by a system of political jugglery with the Negro’s ballots.

“The Southern states seem to live in mortal dread of the Negro with a ballot. They imagine a Pandora’s box of evils will open upon them if the Negro is allowed to vote. This feeling arises more from the fact that the whites want the offices than from any other cause. Past experience shows that Negroes have never attempted to claim all of the offices, even where they did ninety-nine per cent. of the voting. It is a notable fact that in North Carolina during the reconstruction times, when few white men voted and Negroes had a monopoly of the ballot, that white men were put forward for official positions. The same condition existed in the period from 1894 to 1898, during the ‘Fusion Movement,’ when out of ninety-six counties, each of which had three commissioners elected by the people, only four counties out of the ninety-six had a Negro commissioner; and the commissioners in two-thirds of the counties were elected principally by Negro votes—in many of the eastern counties, almost wholly by them. Out of ninety-six counties the Negroes never demanded a single sheriff or a mayor of a city, town or village. There were a few Negro magistrates in the eastern counties, but always more white ones near by and under a provision of a North Carolina statute any defendant who thinks he cannot get justice before the magistrate in whose court he is summoned for trial, can have his case moved to some other justice.

“The evils of reconstruction were due to the general demoralization which followed the Civil War, rather than to the Negro. War is ‘hell’ and so is its aftermath.

“Another pet assertion of the opponents of Negro suffrage is that Negro government is expensive. Those who despair of reaching the American conscience in any other way hope to do so through the pocket argument, commercialism if you please. This argument, like the others, has no facts for a basis. It is a phantom, a delusion and is intended to affect the business element of the North, which people sometimes mistakenly think has more respect for prices than principles. It will not do, however, to listen to the siren of commercialism whose songs are composed by advocates of Negro disfranchisement. There is method in the spell she would bring upon you, and her story is literally nothing but a song.

“The truth is that during the whole period of the ‘Fusion Movement’ North Carolina never had a more economical government—taxes then were 93c. on a hundred dollar valuation; taxes now are $1.23. North Carolina six per cent. bonds then sold for $1.10; they now sell for $1.09. The Fusion government made the state penitentiary self-supporting; the white supremacy government has run it into debt to the amount of $50,000. Under the Fusion government, most of the counties paid off their debts and had a surplus in their treasuries for the first time since the war. Under the Fusion government more miles of railroad were built than in any period of the same length before or since, more cotton factories were established; one of them being owned and operated by Negroes. A silk mill operated entirely by Negro labor, from foremen down, was also established. The fees of public officers were cut down about one-third. These are some of the phases of the Fusion government—a government based almost entirely on Negro votes—that the enemies of Negro suffrage do not discuss.

“It is useless to refer to the period of reconstruction to disprove the theory that Negro suffrage would entail an expensive government on the South, when we have the recent experiment in North Carolina before us. For the sake of argument, we might admit that the Negro was unfit for suffrage forty years ago, but that by no means proves that he is unfit now. Forty years of experience under American institutions have taught him many lessons. He is no longer the ‘child-man,’ as the white supremacy advocates call him. These people are as false in their theories as were the pro-slavery advocates who maintained the absurd proposition that if the Negro was emancipated he would soon perish, for want of sufficient ability to feed and clothe himself. Forty years after emancipation—about as long as Moses was in the wilderness—in spite of these false prophecies, we can now find some of the sons of the prophets fearing and foretelling, not that the Negroes will perish, but that they will outstrip them in the race of life! So the white man in the new constitution is to be allowed to vote on his ‘grand-daddy’s’[7] merits and the Negro must vote on his own.