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Title: The Disfranchisement of the Negro
The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 6

Author: John L. Love

Release Date: February 21, 2010 [EBook #31333]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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OCCASIONAL PAPERS No. 6.

The American Negro Academy.

Rev. ALEXANDER CRUMMELL, Founder.

The Disfranchisement
of the Negro.

By JOHN L. LOVE.

Price 15 cents.

WASHINGTON, D. C.
Published by the Academy,
1899.

The Disfranchisement of the Negro.

"A Constitution formed so as to enable a party to overrule its very
government, and to overpower the people too, answers the purpose
neither of government nor of freedom"--Edmund Burke.

The assault, under the forms of law, which is being made upon the
political rights of the Negro is the symptom of an animus which has its
roots imbedded in the past. It does not mark a revival, but rather the
supreme desperate effort of the spirit of tyranny to compass the
political subjection and consequent social degradation of the black man.
Its provocation does not consist in any abnormal or perilous condition
in southern communities arising from a numerical preponderance of
Negroes. It is not made to meet a merely temporary emergency with the
intent to return to the principles of republican government upon the
advent of intelligence and wealth to the Negro. Indeed, the very intent
and purpose of the assault is to prevent such an advent, in so far as
human ingenuity and tyrannical violence can do so.

It can not find its justification in a necessity of averting by radical
measures any imagined perils to social order which might arise from the
political domination of ignorance; for the spirit which prompts the
assault has ever fostered ignorance and endeavored to perpetuate it. In
fact, the assault is so iniquitous in its conception and is being
executed with such wicked