“A letter written by Mr. Manning to the New York Evening Post in 1903 not only assailed this condition but named the peonage perpetrators. The Literary Digest made a review of the newspaper comment the article aroused. The papers in Alabama, some of them, vilified Mr. Manning unmercifully. He was denounced as a “defamer of his state”, branded as a liar, the peonage conditions were denied; but, in not a great while, the citizens he named were prosecuted and convicted through the operations of the Department of Justice when Mr. Moody was Attorney General.
“In the matter of peonage, as well as in the showing up of “black belt” frauds in the South, it was none other than Hon. Joseph C. Manning who took the initiative and has stood the burden to follow for having stood for right.
“Precisely as he fought “black belt” frauds, helping to unseat Southern members of Congress in 1897, he has kept on fighting disfranchisement and arraigned lynching and all sorts of mobs and mob government.
“President Harding, when in the United States Senate, was called on frequently by Mr. Manning, who discussed these wrongs with the man who was to become President. The Bee then followed the work being done, in 1917, right here in Washington by Mr. Manning. No man, more than the President of the United States, knows about this self-sacrificing labor of Mr. Manning for right and for justice.”
CORRECTED FRATERNAL INFORMATION
In order to prevent possible misleadings or misunderstandings on the part of any reader, the writer quotes below, from pages 457-8 of Work’s Negro Year Book, 1918-1919 edition, the relative positions of officers in different divisions of the Orders of Masons, Odd Fellows and Pythians, which detailed information he found it impossible to put on pages 128-9 on account of lack of space.
“MASONS”
Imperial Council Ancient Egyptian