Roosevelt Insists He's Negro's Friend.

New York Times 100 years ago today, August 3, 1912:
Bull Moose Party Not Discriminating in White Man's Favor, He Explains.
CORRUPTION IN THE SOUTH
Barring of Southern Negro as Chicago Delegate Imperative, but There Will Be Many from the North.
    In a letter to Julian Harris, son of the late Joel Chandler Harris and editor of Uncle Remus Magazine of Atlanta, Ga., Col. Roosevelt sets forth the attitude of the Bull Moose party toward the negro voters of both the South and North. The Colonel says many persons have written him lately regarding the question, those from the North insisting that Southern negro delegates be sent to his National Convention, while the Southern citizens declare that the new party should be exclusively a white man's party. The Colonel says he has been unable to agree with either proposal. On the whole, however, the Southern negros will get little comfort from the Colonel or his party.
    The basis on which his new party should be organized, he says, is that each man be treated on his worth as a man. His motto, he announces, will be "All men up," and not "Some men down." He says:

    For us to oppress any class of our fellow-citizens is not only wrong to others but hurtful to ourselves, for in the long run such action is no more detrimental to the oppressed than to those who think that they temporarily benefit by the oppression. Surely no man can quarrel with these principles. Exactly as they should be applied among white men without regard to their differences of creed or birthplace, or social station, without regard to whether they are rich men or poor men, men who work with their hands or men who work with their brains; so they should be applied among all men without regard to the color of their skins.

    In the South, declares the Colonel, the Democratic machine has sought to keep itself paramount by encouraging the hatred of the white man for the black, while the Republican machine has sought to perpetuate itself by stirring up the black man against the white, and the time has come, he says, to abandon both courses. The Progressive issue, he says, is to be a moral and not a racial one. Different communities demand different ways of treatment of the subject.

Negroes in Bull Moose Party.
    In many of the States, he explains, the best negroes are being brought into the new movement on the same terms as the white man, and these States include Rhode Island, Maryland, New York, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and New Jersey. He says that the Progressive Party at its very birth is endeavoring in these States to act with fuller recognition of tho rights of the negro than ever the Republican Party has. When he was President, he says, he encountered great opposition among the Northern politicians to the appointment of colored men to office, and in appointing a colored man to a high position in New York, he says, he was obliged to do it by main force and against the wish of the entire party organization. He declares:

    In the Republican National Conventions the colored members have been almost exclusively from the South, and the great majority of them have been men of such character that their political activities were merely a source of harm, and of very grave harm, to their own race. We, on the contrary, are hoping to see in the National Progressive Convention colored delegates from the very places where we expect to develop our greatest strength, and we hope to see these men of such character that their activities shall be of benefit not only to the people at large, but especially to their own race. So much for the course we are able to follow in these States, and the citizens of these States can best help the negro race by doing justice to these negroes, who are their own neighbors. In many Northern States there have been lynchings and race riots, with sad and revolting accompaniments; in many of these States there has been failure to punish such outrageous conduct, and, what is even more important, failure to deal in advance wisely and firmly with the evil conditions, among both black men and white, which had caused the outrages.

Republicans' Negro Machine.
For forty-five years, he says, the Republican Party has striven to build up in the Southern States a party consisting almost entirely of negroes, while the number of votes cast in these States for the Republican ticket on Election Day has become negligible. They are powerful In National Conventions, however, and once every four years, in consideration of their votes, they are appointed to local offices by the National Republican Administration. The Colonel then goes on:

    The action of the Republican machine in the South, then, in endeavoring to keep alive a party based only on negro votes, where, with few exceptions, the white leaders are in it only to gain reward for themselves by trafficking in negro votes, has been bad for the white men of the South, whom it has kept solidified in an unhealthy and unnatural political bond, to their great detriment and to the detriment of the whole Union; and it has also been bad for the colored men of the South. The effect on the Republican Party has long been disastrous, and has finally proved fatal. There has in the past been much venality in Republican National Conventions in which there was an active contest for the nomination for President, and this venality has been almost exclusively among the rotten-borough delegates, and for the most part among the negro delegates from these Southern States in which there was no real Republican Party. Finally, in the convention at Chicago last June, the break-up of the Republican Party was forced by these rotten-bouough delegates from the South. In the primary states of the North the colored men in most places voted substantially as their white neighbors voted. But in the Southern States, where there was no real Republican Party, and where colored men, or whites selected purely by colored men, were sent to the convention, representing nothing but their own greed for money or office, the majority was overwhelmingly anti-Progressive. Seven-eighths of the colored men from these rotten-borough districts upheld by their votes the fraudulent-actions of the men who in that convention defied and betrayed the will of the mass of the plain people of the party.
    In spite of the hand-picked delegates chosen by the bosses in certain Northern States, in spite of the scores of delegates deliberately stolen from the rank and file of the party by the corrupt political machine which dominated the National Committee and the convention itself, there would yet have been no hope of reversing in the National Convention the action demanded by the over-whelming majority of the Republicans who had a chance to speak for themselves in their primaries, had it not been for the 250
votes or thereabouts sent from the States in which there is no Republican Party.

Lessons to be Drawn.
    For forty-five years everything has been sacrificed to the effort to build up in these States a Republican Party which should be predominantly and overwhelmingly negro, and now those for whom the effort has been made turned and betrayed that party itself. It would be not merely foolish, but criminal, to disregard the teachings of such a lesson. The disruption and destruction of the Republican Party, and the fact that it has been rendered absolutely impotent as an instrument for anything but mischief in the country at large, has been brought about in large part by the effort to pretend that in the Southern States a sham is a fact; by the insistence upon treating the ghost party in the Southern States as a real party, by refusing to face the truth, which is that under existing conditions there is not and cannot be in the Southern States a party based primarily upon the negro vote and under negro leadership or the leadership of white men who derive their power solely from negroes. With these forty-five years of failure of this policy in the South before our eyes, and with the catastrophe thereby caused to a great National parly not yet six weeks distant from us, it would be criminal for the Progressives to repeat the course of action responsible for such disaster, such failure, such catastrophe.
    The loss of instant representation by Southern colored delegates is due to the fact that the sentiment of the Southern negro collectively has been prostituted by dishonest professional politicians, both white and black, and the machinery does not yet exist (and can never be created as long as present political conditions are continued) which can secure what a future of real justice will undoubtedly develop, namely, the right of political expression by the negro who shows that he possesses the intelligence, integrity, and self-respect which justify such right of political expression in his white neighbor.

    The Colonel concludes that it would be worse than useless to try and build up the Progressive party in the South "by appealing to the negroes or to the men who in the past have derived their sole standing from leading and manipulating the negroes." He adds that "our only wise course from the standpoint of the colored man himself is to follow the course that we are following toward him in the North and to follow the course we are following toward him in the South."