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Footnotes 1313
to learn that in 1 869 the white people of Mississippi unanimously voted at the polls in
favor of ratifying the enfranchising amendment. . .
“Whatever may have been the policy of conferring the right of voting upon the
negro, ignorant and incompetent as he was to comprehend the high responsibility thrust
upon him, and whatever may have been the reasons which dictated this dangerous ex-
periment, the deed has been done and is irrevocable. It is now the part of true states-
manship to give it as far as possible that direction which will be most beneficial or least
hurtful to the body politic.”**
The editor of The News and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, is such an
exception:
“Again let it be said and clearly understood that were The News and Courier a
democratic newspaper, if it believed in democracy as President Roosevelt believes in it,
as he described it in his North Carolina speech last week, it would demand that every
white man and woman and every black man and woman in the South be protected in the
right to vote. It would demand the abolition of all ‘Jim Crow* cars, of all drawing of
the color line by law. That is democracy. But The News and Courier is not a democrat.
It fears and hates democratic government. The News and Courier believes in Democratic
government—Democratic with a big ‘D* and that is another word for a measure of
aristocratic government that ought to be more aristocratic than it is.”®
“In South Carolina, the Democratic party, has been, so far as the negro vote is
concerned, a Fascist party, and that is why The News and Courier ‘cooperates* with it.
In the North the Democratic party has become so democratic that it turns Southern
stomach8.**‘*
A prominent white lawyer in a letter observed:
“We have a newspaper in Charleston, S.C., which fills its editorial column with daily
blasts against the Negro. It is, so far as I know, the last surviving representative of a
school of journalism which was at one time quite common in the state. Its own influence
is rapidly dwindling.**®
The “grandfather clause** no longer belongs to this list since it was declared
unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in 1915.
The author of the disfranchisement amendments of the Virginia Constitution
(1902), Carter Glass, later U. S. senator, replied to a question whether the elimination
of the Negro vote would not be accomplished by “fraud and discrimination**:
“By fraud, no; by discrimination, yes. But it will be discrimination within the letter
of the law. . . , Discrimination! Why, that is precisely what we propose. That,. exactly,
is what this convention was elected for—^to discriminate to the very extremity of per-
“L. Q. C. Lamar, “Ought the Negro to be Disfranchised? —Ought He to Have Been
Enfranchised?” in The North American Review (March, 1879), p. 231.
**
Wade Hampton, “Ought the Negro to be Disfranchised? —Ought He to Have Been
Enfranchised?” in The North American Review (March, 1879), p. 240.
For similar expressions of opinion from other leading Southerners, see the “Symposium:
Ought the Negro to be Disfranchised? —Ought He to Have Been Enfranchised?” in The
North American Review (March, 1879), pp. 225-281, from which the above statements
are taken.
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