The Truth (1911)
To the honest seeker for light the puzzling thing about the Southern situation is the absolutely contradictory statements that are often made concerning conditions. For instance, the New York Evening Post is taken to task by the Norfolk (Ya.) Landmark for assuming that Southern colored men are largely disfranchised. The Virginia paper says “No Negro in Virginia can be kept from voting, provided he measures up to the same requirements for the exercising of that right that the white man must. The laws of the State will protect him in the right should election officials deny it him. That Negroes in this State may freely qualify to vote is fully attested by the fact that thousands of them do vote.” Again, the New Orleans Picayune declares with regard to the complaint of disfranchisement. “The arrant and absolute falsity of the specification in regard to the ballot is seen in the fact that every legal bar to the exercise of the ballot applies to whites and Negroes alike. Every elector (voter) must either be able to read and write or, in case of illiteracy, he must pay taxes on ordinary assessable property of the minimum value of $300. These laws are strictly in accordance with the requirements of the Constitution of the United States, and have been so pronounced by the courts.”
Just so in earlier days before legal disfranchisement, paper after paper and orator after orator declared that the Negro could and did vote without let or hindrance.
Despite this, every intelligent person in the United States knows that these statements are false. The Southern testimony to this is itself open and convincing. Not only have we Mr. Tillman’s frank and picturesque testimony on the past, but today the Richmond (Va.) Leader says that all is well in Virginia “since we disfranchised the Negro”; Congressman Underwood of Alabama says the Alabama Negro “does not count for anything politically” in that State; a prominent judge on the Mississippi bench says “The Negroes in Mississippi do not vote and should not,” and it is a matter of plain official record in Louisiana that of over 150,000 Negro males 21 years of age and over (of whom nearly 70,000 could read and write) there were in 1908 only 1,743 registered as voters, and these were disfranchised by the “White Primary” system. In the face of these facts, does it pay deliberately to misrepresent the truth?
Citation: Du Bois, W.E.B. 1911. “The Truth.” The Crisis. 1(3):16–17.