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88 THE CRISIS Mr. Odum took as his subject the new Southern attitude and pointed out to his hearers the recent important meetings in the South in which the Negro and his rights have been discussed. He noted the conference for education in the South held at Richmond, and quoted U.S. Commissioner of Education Claxton, a Southern man, who voiced the future Southern platform as one which shall give to all alike, rich or poor, white or black, North or South, equal opportunity to develop the best that is in them. "There is now in session in Atlanta," he went on, "the Southern Sociological Conference, the scope of whose program is an inspiration for optimism. Last year and this these programs devoted more time and more sections to the consideration of the Negro problem than to any other topic. Its speakers were selected from many States and activities. "There are also fellowships in the Southern white colleges and universities devoted to the study of conditions among the Negroes in the South and to the impartial presentation of facts through publication and platform. "Another important sign of the times is the growing attitude of the great mass of Southern college and university students to look upon the question with fairmindedness, frankness, and even enthusiasm, and a similar inclination to belittle the demagogue and the politician who attempt to make capital of race prejudice. "One of the great difficulties in the way of promoting wholesome public sentiment is the factor of yellow journalism. A hopeful sign of the times is the policy of certain good Southern newspapers which advocate and practise [[practice]] fair representation and justice to the Negroes. One of the most eloquent appeals for the awakening of social consciousness and one of the most stinging rebukes of low principles that I have ever read was recently printed on the editorial page of a leading Southern newspaper. The subject of the story was a Negro child. "The great progress of the Negroes, their increased land ownership, will exert a profound influence upon the new attitude of the South." Mr. Odum concluded with a cordial invitation to the association and to others to join with the South in the formation of its new attitude and in the solution of its difficulties. The third Southerner to speak at the conference, Mrs. Hammond, is, with her husband, at the head of an important educational work for Negro girls, Payne Memorial College, at Augusta, Ga. This school is supported entirely by white people in the South. Mrs. Hammond told of the new Southern attitude as exemplified in the American Missionary Association, South, which assists in the support of her school. She read from resolutions passed at one of their meetings in which they deplored mob violence, protested against lynching, and pledged themselves to help those whose environment leads them to commit crime. Mrs. Hammond urged the North not to be impatient with the South for its tardiness in understanding its social responsibility. "We are children in this respect," she said, "and perhaps you are not quite grown up; but we will call you the big brother, and big brothers, you know, are apt to be impatient with the younger ones of the household." She told of the investigation into conditions undertaken from Payne College and of the insistence that facts regarding the Negro's housing, education, and environment be placed side by side with the facts regarding the white. "We are training the people to see white and colored side by side, and to see the relation of the one to the other. We have looked at the Negro formerly as one looks at a single piece from a picture puzzle; viewed this way, out of his setting, he was neither appreciated nor understood." Mrs. Hammond had the complete sympathy of her audience. Everyone felt her kindness and her sincerity. The last meeting, held in Witherspoon Hall, was an impassioned presentation of the new abolition movement. The staunch, uncompromising friend of the Negro, Mr. John E. Milholland, presided and Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, Justice Wendell Phillips Stafford and Senator Moses E. Clapp, of Minnesota, were the speakers. Each speaker stood uncompromisingly for the full manhood rights of the Negro in America. The enthusiasm of the audience was an inspiration to each speaker. The Senator from Minnesota declared that we must make the citizenship of the Negro, which to-day in many states is a citizenship only in form, a citizenship in fact. The Negro question, he said, must be conceived as a moral question and answered accordingly. The senator here put The N.A.A.C.P. 89 in a word for woman's suffrage, remarking that the United States failed to get help of the mightiest moral force in the country – American womanhood. Mr. Milholland announced to the meeting the endorsement of the members in executive session of the principle of Federal aid to education and assured the audience that active work was under way already at Washington. Mr. Villard's review of the association's work was listened to with deep interest by the audience. Much that he said is embodied in the last annual report. At the association's first annual conference, held in New York four years ago, Judge Wendell Phillips Stafford delivered a speech at Cooper Union. It set a high mark for the association. It was unembittered, but also uncompromising. Those who heard Judge Stafford then have never forgotten him, and some have been encouraged to work the more faithfully and unswervingly because of his utterance. Again Judge Stafford spoke before the association, this time on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and the constitutionality of the "grandfather" clauses in operation in the Southern States. We end our account of the public meetings of the conference with an excerpt from Judge Stafford's speech: WENDELL PHILLIPS STAFFORD "The constitutions and laws of several of the Southern States require that their citizens, in order to be voters, shall possess a certain amount of taxable property or certain educational qualifications, but further provide that these requirements shall not apply to those who have served in the army of the United States or of the late Confederacy, nor to the sons of grandsons of any such, nor to any who were voters on the 1st day of January, 1867, or who are lineal descendants of such. The question is whether such laws violate any provision of the Constitution of the United States. They make no mention of the race, color or previous condition of servitude, and therefore do not in terms violate the prohibition of the Fifteenth Amendment. Under their express terms a few colored men are entitled to registration equally with their white neighbors. In the main, however, they operate to exclude the colored citizen while admitting the white citizen upon no other grounds than those of military service or descent. If the courts should take judicial notice of the well-known purpose of these laws they must hold them to be unconstitutional and void as discriminating against the colored race. If, however, the courts should refuse to take such notice, must they be held valid? The Supreme Court of the Untied States has shown a disposition to hold that the States might prescribe whatever qualifications they chose touching the suffrage except the discriminations prohibited by the Fifteenth Amendment. There are two provisions of the Federal Constitution, however, which have never been passed upon in this connection. The first is that contained in article IV., section 4: 'The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government.' The second is found in article I., section 10: 'No State shall grant any title of nobility.' A republican form of government is an expression used to distinguish the object described from a form of government which is monarchical or aristocratic; a government in which political power is held or exercised by the people in distinction from on in which it is held or exercised by a monarch or an aristocracy. It is a truism among us that under our form of government the only sovereigns are the voters, the electors. The nominal rulers are made and unmade by the voters. The voters are the real lawmakers, whether they act directly by means of the initiative and referendum or indirectly through their chosen representatives in legislatures. If the number of voters should be reduced to one we should have an absolute monarchy. If it could be confined to certain individuals or families we should have an aristocracy, and if it should be made hereditary we should have an hereditary aristocracy. "Now if one's right to vote can be made to depend on whether his father or his grandfather could vote, then the suffrage could be made and is, in effect, made hereditary. If a State can say to its citizens 'You must own $300 worth of taxable property unless you are descended from a soldier,' it can say 'You must have a hundred thousand dollars' worth or a million dollars' worth.' It can go further and say 'No matter how much taxable property you own you cannot vote unless your grandfather was a soldier.' For if it can make the right of suffrage to depend upon ancestry at all it can make it to depend on ancestry entirely.
