government ordered that ludicrous lackey, Mr. R. R. Moton, to go—for the same reason. In fact, the creation of sinecures for Mr. Scott and the other barnacles is due largely to an uneasy conscience. How would it look to have Negroes telling all Europe that the land which is to make the world “safe for democracy” is rotten with race-prejudice; Jim-crows Negro officers on ships coming over from France and on trains run under government control; condones lynching by silent acquiescence and refuses to let its Negro heroes vote as citizens in that part of the country in which nine-tenths of them live. This wouldn’t do at all.

Therefore: They shall not pass! And if, finally, the government, nettled by such criticisms, should lift the ban when the Peace Congress is practically over, the Negroes of America may be sure that those permitted to go will be carefully hand-picked.

But what is the matter with America as a land for pioneer work in planting democracy? Are these Negro emigrés afraid to face the white men here in the Republican Party or any other and raise Hades until the Constitution is enforced? Is cowardice the real reason for their running to France to uncork their mouths? It looks very much like it. Ladies and gentlemen: don’t run. The fight is here, and here you will be compelled to face it, or report to us the reason why.

A Cure for the Ku-Klux

It was in the city of Pulaski in Giles County, Tennessee, that the original Ku-Klux Klan was organized in the latter part of 1865. The war had hardly been declared officially at an end when the cowardly “crackers” who couldn’t lick the Yankees began organizing to take it out of the Negroes. They passed laws declaring that any black man who couldn’t show three hundred dollars should be declared a vagrant; that every vagrant should be put to work in the chain-gang on the public works of their cities; that three Negroes should not gather together unless a white man was with them, and other such methods were used as were found necessary to maintain “white supremacy.” When the national Congress met in December, 1865, it looked upon these light diversions with an unfriendly eye and, noting that nothing short of the re-enslavement of the Negroes would satisfy the “crackers,” it kept them out of Congress until they would agree to do better. Finding that they were stiff-necked, Congress passed the 14th and 15th amendments and put the “cracker” states under military rule until they accepted the amendments. The result was that the Negro got the ballot as a protection from “the people who know him best.”

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