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THE CRISIS

pecially, do not ask to be paid for conducting an election.  Hence, they are unwilling to incur any expense, as taxpayers, for the protection of the elections in other precincts.  They fancy that because they are honest all other voters are and the thought of an Australian ballot law, with its expense and slight inconvenience, offends them.  They are opposed to innovation.  Rather than submit to it, they are entirely willing to jog along and allow their votes to be cancelled by some rotten precinct where heelers abound who see to it that fraudulent votes are cast or that honest votes are fraudulently counted.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE IN TENNESSEE

ON Sunday, January 21, 1917, the staff correspondent of the Memphis, Tenn., Commercial Appeal wrote from the State Capitol as follows:

The main question before many of the legislators now is the suffrage question.  It is particularly important since the poll tax provision has been eliminated from the woman suffrage bill, and since the Republicans, on account of that elimination, have come over so unitedly for it.  What effect, if any, will the extension of the franchise to women on Presidential elections in Tennessee have on the state's vote hereafter in the election question?

The Republicans could have killed the woman suffrage bill which the House passed Friday.  At any stage of the proceedings they could have cast their strength to the minority on the Democratic side.  They have twenty-seven votes in the House.  The Democrats voted twenty-four against woman suffrage, and if the situation had not been so strongly in favor of the question a half dozen others who voted yes would have been recorded as voting no.

But to analyze: When the bill was up in the Senate four of the six Republicans there were unalterably against it.  Senator Houk, of Knox, favored it, but his colleague, Senator Ogle, was undecided.  The Republicans of the House were openly declaring themselves this way and that, without any indication of a fixed determination.  Even Thursday found them divided.  When they took their seats in the House Friday morning every single one of them was enthusiastic for the bill.  The old argument that they did not propose to vote for a bill that would only increase the Democratic strength of Tennessee gave way to a hearty support and even leadership.  The Republican floor leaders took a decidedly active part in the debates and the arguments leading up to the passage of the bill.  The elimination of the poll tax caught them.

Of course, it is not proper to question any motives, except those which may show politics.  It is true that the bill, as passed by the House, gives every woman in the state by the House, gives every woman in the state the right to vote, and that vote may be cast without the payment of a poll tax.  Every woman, white or black, in Tennessee can go to the ballot box, if this bill is passed, and cast a vote without any poll tax receipt.

This has set the west Tennessee Democrats to thinking.  The Senate is yet to consider the bill.  There are ten senators from west Tennessee.  Of course, if every white woman in west Tennessee should go to the polls and vote as her husband has been voting, the Democratic majority would be increased from 20,000 to 40,000.  But, they argue, what would have been the situation in Memphis last November?

There are some ambitious Negroes in Memphis.  They undertook to make themselves felt at the polls.  Not only did they undertake to carry Shelby County for Hughes for President, but they got out candidates of their own, and those candidates ran second.

And this was done, too, after the Negroes themselves had paid upwards of $3,000 poll taxes.  If they had had no poll taxes to pay, there is no telling how many would have voted.  There is no telling how many women they would have been able to corral and lead to the polls.  These observations are not urged by Democrats as reasons why the suffrage should not be extended, but, after all, they are food for thought.  They are such good food that the Senate, no doubt, will seriously consider the question of putting the poll tax clause back into the bill.

It is a question that will be seriously considered by west Tennessee senators from counties in which the Negro population exceeds the white population.

These west Tennessee senators are confronted with this also: That the Negro woman is far less ready for the important and sacred right of voting than the Negro man.  The man has had fifty years of it, and still it is a novelty to him.  Certainly, the ballot in the hands of Negro women, without any restrictions, would at least remind the older citizens of the wild and exciting times in reconstruction days.

That is the plain truth of the whole matter.

It is a proposition that west Tennessee Democrats should wrestle with long and patiently.  It is not a question of denying the right to vote; it is a question of throwing the proper safeguards around the ballot box.

In county after county in west Tennessee there is not even a registration required, nor is the Dortch ballot voted.  The women would have the right to vote for President.  The laws and their judges are sometimes pretty diligent about seeing that voters are not interfered with in federal elections.  The Republicans last fall sent $50,000 into Tennessee to throw this state against Woodrow Wilson.

It occurs to many that if our good women want to vote it would not be ungallant to suggest that they pay (two dollars) a year to the public schools for the privilege.  They 

THE LOOKING GLASS

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are perfectly willing to do so if the legislature requires it.

The Republicans for forty years have fought against a poll tax qualification.  Now, under this bill, half of the voters are exempt from poll tax.

It is worth thinking about.

So much for the thinking of the South on woman suffrage.  As a sequel a colored Tennessee correspondent writes us:

The suffrage bill for women passed in the House, and was killed in the Senate, for no other reason than they did not want Negro women to have the right to vote.  They remembered the activity of the Lincoln League, at the polls in Memphis and Shelby County last Fall, and they feared the results if they passed the suffrage bill with, or without, the poll tax qualification.

PHILLIP, DRUNK AND SOBER

THE Columbia, S.C., State complains that the Negro problem keeps the South continually "explaining."  It does; and unless these explanation are a little less contradictory in the future than they have been for more months past, they will leave an unpleasant taste in the mouths of honest readers.

For instance:

EDUCATION

Instead of taking him into our white schools where he may be educated as a Negro, not as a nondescript pariah, respected by nobody, embarrassed, embittered and handicapped by compulsory association with a superior 
race.——Beaumont, Tex., Enterprise.

The rural schools for Negro children where they exist at all are a joke.
There are in Texas some 200,000 Negro children of scholastic age, the great majority of whom live in the rural districts.  The $1,500,000 of the State school fund, which constitutes the Negroes' share, is for the greater part diverted to the white schools in most counties.——Houston, Tex., Post.

WAGES

The Negro earns as a rule more money in the South than in the North.  The Negro as a rule lives better in the South than in the North, and with far less exertion on his part.  In sickness he is treated as well or better here than there, and in death he is buried quite as decently.  Here is his opportunity; here in the South he may be all he is worthy of being; he can work out his destiny unhampered by restrictions of any kind beyond the rule of separation of the races.——Beaumont, Tex., Enterprise.

That they are underpaid is a fact well nigh universally admitted.  Their wages in general are such as they can not live on comfortably and they are often forced to steal or starve.  The homes rented to them are nothing short of a scandal to us.  The Negro quarters in our cities are places of darkness, filth and neglect.  They become veritable incubators of every kind of disease to be distributed by them throughout our cities and states.  Our laws are discriminatory in their application toward them, criminal traps are set for them in business transactions and when the plot matures they are punished for the sins which others have committed against them.——Correspondent in Columbia, S.C., State.

TREATMENT

So long as the Negro remains in his place in the Southland, he is going to be treated right by the whites, who know and understand him.  And he is going to get a fair deal here.——Columbus, Ga., Ledger.

Only a few days ago two young Negroes, who left Lowndes County the latter part of last year became they could not make a living (and against the will of the white man whom they had been working for all their lives, for nothing), hearing that their old father was dying, went back to see the last of him.  Simply because they would not agree to stay, the white man, as usual, began to cuff and kick them around.  When they attempted to defend themselves, and having made their way to Montgomery, they were arrested as they started to board the train for Birmingham, where they had work.  Carried back, on the way a mob, as usual, overpowered the sheriff and hanged them both to the first tree they could find, simply because they would not stay and work on the farm, where they could not even get enough t eat.——Letter from Birmingham, Ala., in New York Sun.