Southerners Who Are Speaking Out
In spite of the domination of both parties in the South by narrowing groups of leaders there are not wanting men to fight for a new alignment. On the Republican side one of these men is Joseph C. Manning, of Alexander City, Ala., who publishes a paper called the Southern American. He has shown how white men are being disfranchised as well as Negroes, how the South is controlled by a “Bourbon oligarchy” in the Democratic party and a “federal-for-revenue” Republican party—as he calls them. His paper appears every week with his denunciations in big letters, urging the Republican party to reform and become a party of truth and progress.
He says:
THE RALLYING CRY
The great body of the people of the white South, the masses of the white people of Alabama, are to-day suppressed by the strategy of a political autocracy dominating under the guise and pretence of a democracy.
Why not throw off the yoke and get in the fight?
Rise up above this petty delegate getting, patronage manipulating, state chairman squabbling, until this small politics shall become lost in the great and the supreme issue.
Stop this “lily-white” nonsense. Quit being sidetracked by this Bourbon wail of Negro. Recognise this vital force of the immovable truth that an injustice to one American citizen will react upon all. You can’t have one law for the white man and another for the Negro in our form of government. You know that those who have the most talked of suppressing blacks have really suppressed you, white Republicans, and the most of the Southern whites.
The outcry of Negro and social equality and the like is the very essence of political moonshine.
A number of men inside the Democratic party are not afraid to speak out. Ex-Congressman Fleming of Georgia said in a notable address at Athens, Ga.: