Racial fear, no doubt, plays a large part in this determination, but there is a further consideration. The Solid South votes Democratic to a man. The Negro, if he had a chance, would vote as solidly Republican. I remember being present at a violent quarrel at a Negro meeting in New Orleans—one Negro, though he had not a vote, had actually called himself a Democrat. A remedying of the defective suffrage would be an enormous access of strength to the Republican party. For this reason Democrats exaggerate their racial fear. And also for that reason every Republican politician who gains power is bound to make a bid to break the solid South. Senator Lodge himself was the author of a “Force Bill” which came near enactment some years ago, and it would have placed Federal soldiers at every ballot box in the South, to protect black voters.
The South defies anything which the Federal Government may devise. As Senator Lamar, of Mississippi, said to his colleagues in the Senate:
“But there is one issue upon which the South is solid, and upon which she will remain solid—the protection of her civilization from subjection to an ignorant and servile race. And neither Federal honors nor Federal bayonets can shake that solidity.”
President Wilson’s administration has been one which was dominated by Southern Democrats, and as the Southern vote has been behind him and them, there could hardly be any help given to the Negroes. The Democratic failure has nevertheless been a real disappointment. Wilson’s radical idealism; his plunge to the root of trouble wherever trouble was, led many to believe that he would do something to remedy the pitiable state of the Negroes. Some legal palliative would come with a better grace from Democrats than a forceful measure enacted over their heads by Republicans. Perhaps with the downfall of the Democratic party and the coming triumph of the Republicans something practical will be done during the next few years to help the Negro. The main hope of color must lie in a Republican President and a Republican Senate being in power together. November, 1920, and its elections will be as fateful for the Negro as for the world.
Roosevelt gave his party a generous lead when he received Booker T. Washington at the White House, and I heard young Colonel Roosevelt one evening, with his father’s nerve and pluck, promise a vast Negro audience a “square deal” if they would have patience. That square deal is the Negro’s right, especially in the matter of the vote. It is strange that the movement for the “rights of man” inaugurated practically in the French Revolution should have stopped short about 1870, and the contrary ideal of the “privilege of individuals” begun to progress. As Sutton Griggs very forcefully put it in his address to the National Baptist Convention at Newark, New Jersey:
“In 1792 a motion was carried in the English House of Commons providing for the gradual abolition of the slave traffic. In 1794 the French Convention decreed that the rights of French citizens should be granted to all slaves in French colonies. In 1834 the British abolished slavery entirely within their dominions. In 1848 French slaves were emancipated. In 1863 the Dutch set their slaves free. The South, unmoved by world thought, clung to its slaves, but they were violently torn from her grasp in the Civil War. Under the impulse of the doctrine of the native equality of all men the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, forbidding the denial of the right to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was adopted in the year 1869. In the year 1870, bills were passed by Congress providing fines and imprisonment for anyone who even tried to prevent the Negro from voting or to keep his vote from being counted.
“But all of the forces that could be marshaled have not, up to the present time, been able to move our nation or the world one inch forward in a straight line from this point. The action just mentioned stands as the last recorded national act designed to incorporate the Negro race in the governmental structure without reservations. Further efforts were made by powerful forces, but all have proved to be abortive. In 1875 a very comprehensive bill intended to make the Negroes of the South secure in their rights passed the lower house of Congress but was defeated in the Senate. Some years later, the Lodge Election Bill, having the same purpose, passed the House but was defeated in the Senate. The Republican party’s platform, upon which President Taft was elected, contained an unequivocal declaration in favor of enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment in letter and in spirit, but no legislation in that direction was attempted during his term of office.”
To-day, however, a world war and the greatest affirmation of the rights of nations if not of man, has been made. There is an opportunity to resume the interrupted advance.