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| Photograph by G. V. Buck | ||
| COLONEL JAMES LEWIS United States Receiver at New Orleans | W. T. VERNON Register of the United States Treasury | RALPH W. TYLER An auditor of the Government at Washington |
It was prophesied that when the Negro was disfranchised by law and “eliminated from politics” the South would immediately stop discussing the Negro question and divide politically along new lines. But this has not happened. Though disfranchisement laws have been in force in Mississippi for years there is less division in the white party of that state than ever before.
Why is this so? Because the Negro, through gradual education and the acquisition of property, is becoming more and more a real as well as a potential factor in politics. For he is just beginning to be really free. And the South has not yet decided how to deal with a Negro who owns property and is self-respecting and intelligent and who demands rights. The South is suspicious of this new Negro: it dreads him; and the politicians in power are quick to play upon this sentiment in order that the South may remain solid and the present political leadership remain undisturbed.
For the South, however much it may talk of the ignorant masses of Negroes, does not really fear them; it wants to keep them, and keep them ignorant. It loves the ignorant, submissive old Negroes, the “mammies” and “uncles”; it wants Negroes who, as one Southerner put it to me, “will do the dirty work and not fuss about it.” It wants Negroes who are really inferior and who feel inferior. The Negro that the South fears and dislikes is the educated, property-owning Negro who is beginning to demand rights, to take his place among men as a citizen. This is not an unsupported statement of mine, but has been expressed over and over again by speakers and writers in every part of the South. I have before me a letter from Charles P. Lane, editor of the Huntsville (Alabama) Daily Tribune, written to Governor Comer. It was published in the Atlanta Constitution. The writer is arguing that the Negro disfranchisement laws in Alabama are too lenient, that they permit too many Negroes to vote. He says:
We thought then (in 1901, when the new Alabama Constitution disfranchising the Negro was under discussion), as we do now, that the menace to peace, the danger to society and white supremacy was not in the illiterate Negro, but in the upper branches of Negro society, the educated, the man who, after ascertaining his political rights, forced the way to assert them.
He continues:
We, the Southern people, entertain no prejudice toward the ignorant per se inoffensive Negro. It is because we know him and for him we entertain a compassion. But our blood boils when the educated Negro asserts himself politically. We regard each assertion as an unfriendly encroachment upon our native superior rights, and a dare-devil menace to our control of the affairs of the state.
In this are we not speaking the truth? Does not every Southern Caucasian “to the manor born” bear witness to this version? Hence we present that the way to dampen racial prejudice, avert the impending horrors, is to emasculate the Negro politically by repealing the XV Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
I use this statement of Mr. Lane’s not because it represents the broadest and freest thought in the South, for it does not, but because it undoubtedly states frankly and clearly the point of view of the majority of Southern people. It is the point of view which, talked all over Georgia last year, helped to elect Hoke Smith governor of the state, as it has elected other governors. Hoke Smith’s argument was essentially this:
Hoke Smith’s Views