In
1866 Governor John A. Andrew foresaw clearly what would be the fate of the
Negro in the old slave states without the ballot. The condition which the
great War Governor foresaw then fits remarkably well the Negro's actual
condition to-day in certain sections of the nation. "Meanwhile," he said,
"the disfranchised freedmen, hated by some because he is black, contemned
by some because he has been a slave, feared by some because of the
antagonisms of society, is condemned to the condition of a hopeless pariah
of a merciless civilization. In the community he is not of it. He neither
belongs to a master nor to society." The thing which John A. Andrew
foresaw in 1866 as likely to come to pass in case of disfranchisement of
the blacks, has been coming to pass ever since. And the cause which has
reduced the Negro to his present anomalous position in the Republic of
which he is a citizen, is his lack of the right to vote, which makes its
possessor a part of the community in which he lives, and enables him to
make that community respond to his needs as a vital part of its body
social and politic.

The Negro in the mass is a disfranchised man. His political influence in
Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina
and Virginia is practically at the zero point. The mass of the
disfranchised in those seven Southern States is so great that by the law
of gravitation its very weight and number affect more or less adversely
the status of the rest of the race in other states. The disfranchised
Negro operates in many ways to depreciate the rights of the enfranchised
Negro, and to draw him by the invisible threads of race kinship and of
race prejudice toward if not quite within the zone of his own limitations
and disabilities. A disfranchised class in an industrial republic like
ours is as much at the mercy of an enfranchised class as is a flock of
shepherdless sheep at the mercy of a pack of wolves. The wolves will
devour the sheep and the enfranchised class will prey on the disfranchised
class. To the wall the weak will be driven and harried and destroyed
whether they be sheep or men, and this the strong will do every time
whether they be men or wolves. The shepherd protects the sheep from the
depredations of the wolves, and the ballot protects poverty against
property, a weak race or class against the hate and aggressions of
stronger ones within the same country.

A citizen without the ballot in America is