The Negro as a Political Force in America and in the South since 1900; [1964?]

              The Negro as a Political Force in America and in the South since 1900
Transcript

by Otis Pease

(An informal narrative written for the Hattiesburg Freedom School and Voter Registration staffs by way of a brief refresher course in those aspects of our recent history which may prove useful for perspective in the Summer Project.)

The present pattern of discrimination and prejudice against the Negro was set mostly in the period from 1900 to 1930. These years were a time of political reform and social advancement for most Americans, even for immigrants and northern Negroes, but in retrospect they seem to have been the most humiliating years since slavery in the equal treatment of southern Negroes. Where they were once encouraged to vote and hold minor office (as in the Delta in the 1880s) he was now kept from voting by law, by private coercion, and by habit. Where once the Negro leader of national prominence (Bruce, Lynch, Washington) represented the southern black man, he was now northern and urban in his interests (DuBois, Trotter, White). Where white and Negro southerners once rode and ate in the same passenger cars and played in the same public parks (1865-1900, even after reconstruction ended), he was now excluded by local ordinance from virtually every possible contact with white people. Once the southern man of property courted him for his vote against the political power of the southern farmer of little property (about 1875 to 1890). Shortly thereafter the radical Populist attracted Negro support in an effective appeal to a solidarity of the have-nots against the large landowner and industrialist. On both occasions the Negro tried to gain the advantages of political power, but in fact he never became more than a junior partner, and these alliances proved psychologically too difficult for southern white men to sustain in the face of the increasingly bitter appeals to racial solidarity on the part of whichever white group the Negroes were being encouraged to oppose. Between 1896 and 1903 every southern state possessing a substantial Negro population amended their constitutions to permit official white primaries and to prohibit - by ingenious laws - both Negroes and uncooperative poor whites from voting. Note the graphic case of Louisiana:

1897 registration (old const.):
White - 165,000
Negro - 130,000

190* registration (new const.):
White - 125,000
Negro - 5,000

1904 registration (poll tax added):
White - 92,000
Negro - 1,300

From this point forth, southern states were run by small, easily-controlled voting blocs, which represented largely the upper half of the social structure.

It is generally believed that aggression feeds on frustration. The South in 1900 was a likely land for aggression against a minority race, for economic problems had built to a climax of frustrations. Two thirds of its white men lived in conspicuous poverty, and it was virtually impossible to persuade an impoverished white farmer to accord any break - economic or social - to Negroes