The Montgomery advertiser., 1904-09-02
soUTHERNERs SPEAKING ronrr

SOUTHERNERS SPEAKING NORTH, dangerous talk can be indulged in by Southern speakers on Northern plat forms when these speakers feel con- strained to talk about the negro ques. tion. Here is Senator Latimer pro- claiming from the doorsteps at Esopus that the woods at the South are full of | orators anxious to go North and in- ! form the people there about the real | significance of the race problem; that | Rooseveltianism constitutes the real issue, etc. We were about to quote the South Carolina Senator's exact lan- guage and turned to The New York Herald for the quotation only to find that journal had not seen fit to print it at all; fact significant in itself.
 The difficulty the Southern man finds in talking to a Northern audience on this subject grows out of the widely | differing situations with respect to the black race, and a Democrat up there Is as difficult to reach as a Republican when it comes to our distinctly South- ern views. Tammany has negro mem- bers and lays down only one requisite for admission, Have you a voter Look at the action of the St. Louis con- vention framing its negro plank John Sharp Williams had put in the pro- visional platform, what would seem to us to be colorless paragraph about fri nj izip A'cIo ernment. This was too strong for our Northern brethren and they were con- tent to enter formal protest against any renewal of the race agitation. The South we are willing to confess holds what may be deemed radical views on the negro's full participation in the suffrage. They mean to main- tain governments by white men and in their view, threatened foreign com plications and robber tariffs, concern them far less vitally than the per- petuity of their local governments and institutions. That, however is our own concern and to rush at the North with propaganda of white supremacy when they have no problem of the kind is to make them wonder and stare Such race issue speeches as the North should hear during this campaign ought to be made by Northern not Southern Democrats.
 They have a race question there of a sort and we chance to know many Republicans seriously fear that Roose- welt has cost his Party many thousands of votes by so warmly embracing the negros cause. If the word negro" was never mentioned in a doubtful State he would nevertheless lose votes for this is a matter about which men do their own thinking. Its effect in State like New Jersey. can be illus trated by the result of an election in Union County last year. A negro physician was nominated for coroner in that county which is ordinarily nothing, they had no meetings, there was no public discussion of the negro's candidacy and he was well re- garded as a man. The entire Repub- lican ticket was defeated by nearly ff- teen hundred majority and the negro doctor, by four thousand. It is easy to conceive that a dozen of Senator Latimer's young Southern orators who are straining at their leashes just now might have been turned loose In Union County, New Jersey and accomplished the triumphant election of the black man.
 It seems more than likely that an unusual number of Southern men will be called on to assist in the campaign for Parker and Davis at the North and in the West. They can undoubtedly do effective work there; but this can be accomplished not by speaking as If the whole country were threatened with a black terror, but by addressing them selves gravely, and capably to the larger national issues, corruption in the departments, the turbulent chief executive with his continuing menace to orderly and peaceful constitutional government and the scandalous exac- tions of the protective tariff levied in the interest of privileged classes of manufacturers and the trusts.
 
 woman in Oregon is suing for di-