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the Negro delegates were lined up to do their duty by the party. Of course, these delegates had to deal collectively with the white leaders. This was to their mutual advantage. But the odd feature of the entire affair was this, that. Whereas the Negro people in the South are not free to cast their votes, it was precisely from these voteless areas that the national Republican leaders selected the political spokesmen for the voting Negroes of the North. Men who will not vote at the coming election and inen who, like Roscoe Simmons, never cast a vote in their lives were the accredited representatives in whose hands lay the destiny of a million Negro voters.

But there need be no fear that this insult will annoy the black brother in the Republican ranks. A Negro Republican generally runs the rhinoceros and the elephant a close third. In plain English, the average Negro Republican is too stupid to see and too meek to mind. Then, too, here is Fate's retribution for the black man in the North who has never cared enough to fight (the Republican party) for the political freedom of his brother in the South, but left him to rot under poll-tax laws and grandfather clauses. The Northern white Democrats, for letting their Southern brethren run riot through the Constitution, must pay the penalty of being led into the ditch by the most ignorant, stupid and vicious portion of their party. Even so, the Northern Negro Republican, for letting his Southern brother remain a political ragamuffin, must now stomach the insult of this same ragamuffin dictating the destiny of the freer Negroes of the North. In both cases the tail doth wag the dog because of "the solid South." Surely, "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether!"----July, 1920.

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The Grand Old Party

In the early days of 1861, when the Southern Senators and Representatives were relinquishing their seats in the United States Congress and hurling cartels of defiant explanation broadcast, the Republican party in Congress, under the leadership of Charles Francis Adams of Massachusetts, organized a joint committee made up of thirteen members of the Senate and thirty-three members of the House to make overtures to the seceding Southerners. The result of this friendly gesture was a proposed thirteenth amendment, which, if the Southerners had not been so obstinate, would have bridged the chasm. For this amendment proposed to make the slavery of the black man in America eternal and inescapable. It provided that no amendment to the Constitution, or any other proposition affecting slavery in any way, could ever be legally presented upon the floor of Congress unless its mover had secured the previous consent of every Senator · and Representative from the slave-holding States. It put teeth into the Fugitive Slave Law and absolutely gave the Negro over into the keeping of his oppressors.

Most Negro Americans (and white ones, too) think it fashionable to maintain the most fervid faith and deepest ignorance about points in their national history of which they should be informed. We therefore submit that these facts are open and notorious to those who know American history. The record will be found slimly and shamefacedly given in McPherson's "History of the Rebellion"; at indignant length in Blaine's "Twenty Years of Congress" and Horace Greeley's "The Great American Conflict." The document can be examined in Professor Macdonald's "Select Documents of United States History." These works are to be found in every public library, and

we refer to them here because there are "intellectual" Negroes today who are striving secretly, when they dare not do so openly, to perpetuate the bonds of serfdom which bind the Negro Americans to the Republican party. This bond of serfdom, this debt of gratitude, is supposed to hinge on the love which Abraham Lincoln and his party are supposed to have borne towards the Negro; and the object of this appeal to the historical record is to show that that record demonstrates that if the Negro owes any debt to the Republican party it is a debt of execration and of punishment rather than one of gratitude.

over.

It is an astounding fact that in his First Inaugural Address Abraham Lincoln gave his explicit approval to the substance of the Crittenden resolutions which the joint committee referred to above had collectively taken This demonstrates that the Republican party at the very beginning of its contact with the Negro was willing to sell the Negro, bound hand and foot, for the substance of its own political control. This Thirteenth Amendment was adopted by six or eight Northern States. including Pennsylvania and Illinois; and if Fort Sumter had not been fired upon it would have become by State action the law of the land.

The Republican party did not fight for the freedom of the Negro, but for the maintenance of its own grip on the government which the election of Abraham Lincoln had secured. If any one wants to know for what the Republican party fought he will find it in such facts as this: That thousands of square miles of the people's property were given away to Wall Street magnates who had corrupted the Legislature in their effort to build railroads on the government's money. The sordid story is given in "Forty Years in Wall Street," by the banker, Henry

Clews, and others who took part in this raid upon the resources of a great but stupid people.

But the Civil War phase of the Republican party's treason to the Negro is not the only outstanding one, as was shown by the late General Tremaine in his "Sectionalism Unmasked." Not only was General Grant elected in 1868 by the newly created Negro vote, as the official records prove, but his re-election in 1872 was effected by the same means. So was the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. Yet when the election of Hayes had been taken before the overwhelmingly Republican Congress this shameless party made a deal whereby, in order to pacify the white "crackers” of the South, the Negro was given over into the hands of the triumphant Ku-Klux; the soldiers who protected their access to the ballot.box in the worst southern states were withdrawn, while the "crackers" agreed as the price of this favor to withdraw their opposition to the election of Hayes. For this there exists ample proof which will be presented upon the challenge of any politician or editor. As a Republican Senator from New England shamelessly said, it was a matter of "Root, hog, or die" for the helpless Negro whose ballots had buttressed the Republican party's temple of graft and corruption. So was reconstruction settled against the Negro by the aid and abetting of the Republican party. And since that time lynching, disfranchisement and segregation have grown with the Republican party in continuous control of the government from 1861 to 1920 --with the exception of eight years of Woodrow Wilson and eight years of Grover Cleveland. With their continuing consent the South has been made solid, so that at every Republican convention delegates who do not represent a voting constituency but a grafting collection of white postmasters and their Negro lackeys can turn

the scales of nomination in favor of any person whom the central clique of the party, controlled as it has always been by Wall Street financiers, may foist upon a disgusted people, as they have done in the case of Harding. So long as the South remains solid, so long will the Republican delegates from the South consist of only this handful of hirelings; so long will they be amenable to the "discipline" which means the pressure of the jobs by which they get their bread. Therefore the Republican leaders will know that the solidarity of the South is their most valuable asset; and they are least likely to do anything that will break that solidarity. The Republican party's only interest in the Negro is to get his vote for nothing; and so long as Negro Republican leaders remain the contemptible grafters and political procurers that they are at present, so long will it get Negro votes for nothing.

Through it all the Republican party remains the most corrupt influence among Negro Americans. It buys up by jobs, appointments and gifts those Negroes who in politics should be the free and independent spokesmen of Negro Americans. But worse than this is its private work in which it secretly subsidizes men who pose before the public as independent radicals. These intellectual pimps draw private supplementary incomes from the Republican party to sell out the influence of any movement, church or newspaper with which they are connected. Of the enormity of this mode of procedure and the extent to which it saps the very springs of Negro integrity the average Negro knows nothing. Its blighting, baleful influence is known only to those who have trained cars to hear and trained eyes to see.

And now in this election the standards will advance and the cohorts go forward under the simple impulse of the same corrupting influence. But whether the new move

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