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THE AMENIA CONFERENCES                                DIGGS

Negro Improvement Association.

  In 1912 there were three presidential candidates: Wilson, a Democrat, made only the vaguest concessions to Blacks; Taft had thoroughly alienated them; Roosevelt, while appealing to black voters in the North, had refused to seat black delegates from the South at the Progressive Party Convention. Roosevelt had also allowed Southern whites to exclude the NAACP's platform amendment calling for the repeal of unfair discriminatory laws and the complete enfranchisement of Blacks. Upon winning the Presidential election, Wilson's first Congress sent to the Administration the greatest flood of bills proposing discriminatory legislation against Blacks that had ever been introduced into an American Congress: bills advocating segregation on public carriers in Washington, D.C., the exclusion of Blacks from Army and Navy commissions, separate accommodations for black and white federal employees, no intermarriage between Blacks and whites, and the exclusion of all black immigration. Most of the segregation legislation introduced in the first Wilson Congress failed to pass in 1913, but Wilson, by executive order, segregated most of the black Federal employees so far as eating and rest room facilities were concerned. Wilson refused, when asked by Oswald Garrison Villard, to appoint a National Race Commission to study the status of Blacks and appointed whites to posts traditionally given to Blacks, that is, in Haiti and Santo Domingo. In 1914, a delegation, headed by Monroe Trotter, obtained an audience with Wilson to protest segregation but the conference ended when Wilson ordered Trotter out of his office for what he deemed "insulting" language. The NAACP employed two legislative agents to keep track of all anti-Negro bills introduced in Congress; Blacks protested Wilson's order for the occupation of Haiti by United States marines; but in many respects Blacks were politically helpless.

  In 1915 labor wages reached a new low, the boll weevil devastated the cotton crop, and huge waves of southern black labor migrated to northern industrial centers. When Booker T. Washington, "the most distinguished man, white or black, . . . out of the South since the Civil War," died in 1915 the advancing tide of segregation and disenfranchisement had made protest seem futile. The conditions of Blacks had definitely deteriorated. Segregation covered practically every phase of black-white relations. Southern states, by amendment and legislation, had deprived practically all Blacks of the right to vote. Jim Crow cars, injustice in courts, false arrest, lynchings, riots were the order of the day. Differences of opinions were

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