England shamelessly said, it was a matter of “Root, hog, or die” for the helpless Negro whose ballots had buttressed the Republican party’s temple of graft and corruption. So was reconstruction settled against the Negro by the aid and abetting of the Republican party.

And since that time lynching, disfranchisement and segregation have grown with the Republican party in continuous control of the government from 1861 to 1920—with the exception of eight years of Woodrow Wilson and eight years of Grover Cleveland. With their continuing consent the South has been made solid, so that at every Republican convention delegates who do not represent a voting constituency but a grafting collection of white postmasters and their Negro lackeys can turn the scales of nomination in favor of any person whom the central clique of the party, controlled as it has always been by Wall Street financiers, may foist upon a disgusted people, as they have done in the case of Harding. So long as the South remains solid, so long will the Republican delegates from the South consist of only this handful of hirelings; so long will they be amenable to the “discipline” which means the pressure of the jobs by which they get their bread. Therefore the Republican leaders will know that the solidarity of the South is their most valuable asset; and they are least likely to do anything that will break that solidarity. The Republican party’s only interest in the Negro is to get his vote for nothing; and so long as Negro Republican leaders remain the contemptible grafters and political procurers that they are at present, so long will it get Negro votes for nothing.

Through it all the Republican party remains the most corrupt influence among Negro Americans. It buys up by jobs, appointments and gifts those Negroes who in politics should be the free and independent spokesmen of Negro Americans. But worse than this is its private work in which it secretly subsidizes men who pose before the public as independent radicals. These intellectual pimps draw private supplementary incomes from the Republican party to sell out the influence of any movement, church or newspaper with which they are connected. Of the enormity of this mode of procedure and the extent to which it saps the very springs of Negro integrity the average Negro knows nothing. Its blighting, baleful influence is known only to those who have trained ears to hear and trained eyes to see.

And now in this election the standards will advance and the cohorts go forward under the simple impulse of the same corrupting influence. But whether the new movement for a Negro party comes to a 

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