Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 56

14. William A. MacCorkle, The Negro and the Intelligence and Property Franchise. Address of Wm. A. MacCorkle, Late Governor of West Virginia, before the Southern Conference on Race Problems, Montgomery, Alabama, May 9, 1900 (Cincinnati, OH: Robert Clarke Co., 1900). (41 p.)

Speech objecting to the disfranchisement of African Americans in the South through the adoption of constitutions with articles specifically designed to accomplish that goal. “Mr. Chairman, the franchise system, as it is at present constituted in many of the States in the South, is to say the least, practically the policy of repression. Repression has been tried at every age of the world’s history and always with the same unvarying result, utter and tremendous failure. It leads nowhere. It raises no man. It demands no education. It holds ignorance as dense as ever. It drives away intelligence. It breeds discontent. It represses any rising aspiration of the heart. It leaves the land at the end of the cycle just as it found it at the beginning. It is the policy of deadly inaction overridden by discontent.”