their sections; the southern members hold the views that are
customary in the South. The doctrine of State's rights is
recognized in the national body and each auxiliary State
association arranges its own affairs in accordance with its own
ideas and in harmony with the customs of its own section.
Individual members in addresses made outside of the National
Association are of course free to express their views on all
sorts of extraneous questions but they speak for themselves as
individuals and not for the association....

The National American Woman Suffrage Association is seeking to do
away with the requirement of a sex qualification for suffrage.
What other qualifications shall be asked for it leaves to each
State. The southern women most active in it have always in their
own State emphasized the fact that granting suffrage to women who
can read and write and who pay taxes would insure white supremacy
without resorting to any methods of doubtful constitutionality.
The Louisiana association asks for the ballot for educated and
taxpaying women only and its officers believe that in this lies
"the only permanent and honorable solution of the race question."
...

The suffrage associations of the northern and western States ask
for the ballot for all women, though Maine and several other
States have lately asked for it with an educational or tax
qualification. To advise southern women to beware of lending
"sympathy or support" to the National Association because its
auxiliary societies in the northern States hold the usual views
of northerners on the color question is as irrelevant as to
advise them to beware of the National Woman's Christian
Temperance Union because in the northern and western States it
draws no color line; or to beware of the General Federation of
Women's Clubs because the State Federations of the North and West
do not draw it; or to beware of Christianity because the churches
in the North and West do not draw it....

The _Times-Democrat_ published this letter in full and endeavored by
its press reports afterwards to atone for its blunder. It had been
feared that trouble over this question would arise but no other paper
referred to it. The _Picayune_, _Item_ and _States_ were most generous
with space and complimentary in expression throughout