Disfranchisement in the South
IN its issue dated August 17, the Literary Digest reports “more steps in negro disfranchisement,” under which heading it mentions “the adoption of a suffrage plan by the Alabama Constitutional Convention that is likely to bar almost all the blacks in the State from the polls without barring any of the whites,” and adds that “the Virginia Constitutional Convention seems likely to adopt a similar plan soon, and the Maryland Democrats declare in their State platform, just adopted, that if they carry the coming election, they will take similar measures in that State.” At this rate the negro will soon be disfranchised throughout the South, and then further steps in the process of reducing him to his “previous condition of servitude” will be logically bound to follow. And they will follow. Thus with one hand this nation is withdrawing freedom from its dark-skinned people at home, while with the other it is supposed to be conferring freedom on dark-skinned races across the sea! But verily it has one and the same mind toward those races everywhere.