Ballot!
Suffrage!
Franchise!
Vote!

The dictionary says:
"Ballot--- the method of secret voting; originally
by means of small balls placed in an urn or box."
"Suffrage--- a vote given by a member of a body,
state, or society, in assent to a proposition or
in favor of the election of a person."
"Franchise--- the right of voting at public elections."
"Vote--- an intimation that one approves or disapproves,
accepts or rejects, a proposal, motion, candidate for office, or the like."

The right to cast a ballot, to exercise
suffrage, to vote is one of the basic
rights of citizens in a democracy --- a democracy,
that form of government in which control is
vested in the people as a whole. The ballot
is basic.

Negro Americans---you, me--- are very much a
part of this democracy. We're 15 million---
and our vote counts. From the national to
the local level, your vote counts. It counts
in more and better jobs---in diplomatic posts
abroad to local political patronage. It
counts in education, in housing, in civil
rights, in cleaner streets, in better garbage
collection. The vote has value. Don't ne-
glect your right to vote. Don't waste it.
Dont forget it.

Maybe all of us would value the right of
suffrage more if we stopped to look back a
moment at what the struggle for the vote has
cost. Back in the Middle Ages few people
had control over their own lives, let alone
over the land or the country. Kings and
barons and chiefs and over-lords ran every-
thing and everybody. Then came the Magna
Carta in 1315 in England, and almost 400

years later the Bill of Rights, many of
whose provisions were incorporated into
our own Constitution in 1787 and into the
American Bill of Rights in 1791. Some of
those rights, we, the Negro people of America,
are still trying to secure in full.

We came to these shores first as explorers---
with Cortez, with Balboa, with Columbus. But
we did not migrate in large numbers. The
majority of our ancestors were brought to the
Americas by force as slaves, dating back from 1619.
Slaves, like serfs in Europe, could not vote.
But very early in our history, after the
colonies won their freedom from the British---
Crispus Attucks of Boston, a Negro, being
the first man killed when resistence to the
British started---free Negros in the New
England colonies voted. Some Negros in our
country have always voted from the very be-
ginning of our United States, and fought
to keep the vote and extend it to others.
But sometimes it was a hard battle. You who
have the vote here in New York, keep it, use
it, and help others to get it.

After the Revolutionary War, free Negros
could vote anywhere, but in 1789 the Southern
slave-holding states sensed danger in letting
free Negroes vote, and began to disfranchise
them. By 1834 no Negroes could vote in the

South, and some Northern states like Penn-
sylvania and Indiana denied them the ballot,
too. But colored men in New York, could
vote if they owned property and had lived
here for three years. This man could vote.

Samuel Fraunces. He was the owner of Fraunces
Tavern at Broad and Pearl Streets in New York
City. At his tavern George Washington often
dined, and when Washington became President,
he made Samuel Fraunces his chief steward.

And I could voted.

Fraunces was a man of means, a solid citizen, interested
in the affairs of the day. Free Negroes in New York
then could vote.

Could I vote? I lived in New York.

No, Sojourner Truth. You were a woman, and in those
days only men could vote.

Which were wrong! I believed everybody should vote,
black and white, men and women: And I said so.

I know you said so. You went to the first women's
suffrage meetings, and you joined with Abby Kelley
and Lucretia Nott and Frances Gage, white women,
in speaking not only for Negro freedom, but for
the freedom of women. You were a runaway slave
who made yourself free.

And I wanted to vote.

When they wouldn't let you sit on the platform
because you were a Negro at the National Woman's
Suffrage Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1852, you
sat where you are sitting now in the audience.

I did---until the going got hot, (SHE RISES) and
the men speakers started baiting the women, and
talking about the women is weak, not strong as
men nor smart as men, and they even have to be
helped into carriages.

Then I just walked up on that platform, sir, and
told them men: 'Nobody ever helped me into carriages,
or over mud puddles, or give me any best place.
Ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!
I have plowed and planted and gathered into barns,
and no man could head me. And ain't I a woman?
I could work as much and eat as much as a man---
when I could get it---and bear the lash as well---
and ain't I a woman? I has had five chillun and
seen 'em most all sold off to slavery, and when
I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus

heard---and ain't I a woman? They talks about
this thing in the head---intellect. What's that
got to do with women's rights? If my cup won't
hold but a pink and yourn holds a quart, wouldn't
ye men be mean not to let me have my little half-
measure full? If the first woman God made was
strong enough to turn the world upside down all
alone, I guess all us women together ought to be
able to turn it back and get it right side up
again. And now that they is asking to do it, the
mens better let 'em."

But it was almost three-quarters of a century
before the country got around to giving you the
vote, Sojourner Truth, before the 19th Amendment
granting women's suffrage was passed.

It were finally passed---and about time, too!
I took my freedom, but I didn't live long enough
to vote.

Freedom! That was the first thing most Negroes
had to get. Before the Civil War most of us
were slaves. But some Negroes, even in the South,
had never been slaves. Some were born free, some
were given their freedom, and some ran away to
freedom in the North. Among the great runaways
was Frederick Douglass who escaped from a Maryland

plantation in 1838, and devoted his life to
fighting for freedom for all, and for full
citizenship rights for all. In his middle age!

After Emancipation, after the Civil War was over,
he made many speeches concerning the franchise.

I see no chance of bettering the condition of the
freedman until he shall cease to be merely a freed-
man and shall become a citizen. I insist that
there is no safety for him or anybody else in
America outside the American government; to guard,
protect, and maintain his liberty the freedman
should have the ballot; the liberties of the
American people are dependent upon the ballot-
box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box.

And it took the cartridge-box to protect the
rights of the freed Negroes in the early days of
the Reconstruction. In 1867 Congress divided
the South into five military districts, proclaimed
universal suffrage, and placed federal marshalls
at the polls to protect the Negro's newly granted
right to vote. This right was made permanent by
the passage in 1870 of the 15th Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States. 700,000 Negroes
were added to the voting rolls of the South, and
many city and state offices were filled by the
freedman. With Negroes in state legislatures,

new state constitutions were drawn up with
provisions for free public schools for all,
civil rights for all, and no property qualifications
for voting---the most progressive acts of laws
the South had ever known, many of them remaining
on the books until today.

During the Reconstruction the Southern states
sent 14 Negro Representatives and 2 Senators of
color to Washington. The first Representative
was from Georgia, elected in 1869, Jefferson P.
Long.

Then in 1871 South Carolina elected four Negro
Congressmen, Joseph H. Rainey.

Robert O. DeLarge.

Alonzo J. Rainer.

And Robert B. Elliott.

That same year Alabama elected Benjamin S. Turner.

In 1873 Mississippi elected John R. Lynch.

Alabama elected James T Rapier.

Florida elected Josiah T. Walls.

And South Carolina elected Richard H. Cain.

That same year to the House of Representatives
North Carolina elected John A. Hyman.

Alabama elected Jene Haralson.

And South Carolina elected Robert Smalls.

The only Negro Senators in American history came
at the very end of the Reconstruction period. The
first, elected in 1870, was Hiram R. Revels.

And the second in 1876 was Blanche K. Bruce.

Most of these men were as well qualified and as
well educated as white officials of the times,
and some better. Some were graduates of Oberlin
or other leading Northern colleges. Elliott had
studied abroad. Of those who served in Congress,

the Republican leader, James G. Blaine, said,
"They were as a rule studious, earnest, ambitious
men, whose public conduct would be honorable to
any race." Typical of the Negroes who serves in
the House of Representatives at Washington was
Richard H. Cain, A.M.E. minister of South Carolina.
Cain made a stirring speech in Congress regarding
Civil Rights.

I do not ask any legislation for the colored people
of this country that is not applied to white people.
All that we aks is equal laws, not equal legislation,
and equal rights throughout the length and breadth
of this land. We do not come here begging for our
rights. We come here clothed in the garb of
American citizenship. We come demanding our rights
in the name of our children, in the name of our country.

During the Reconstruction in lesser degrees thereafter,
many Negroes were active in state governments. For example, between 1868 and
1896 Louisiana elected 32 state senators of color and 95 representatives.
P. B. S. Pinchback was lieutenant-Governor and, in 1873, after the removal of
the white incumbent, Pinchback became Acting-Governor of Louisiana. In Florida,
Jonathan Gibbs, a Dartmouth graduate, became Secretary of State. And in South
Carolina, the London-educated Francis L. Cardoso was from 1872 to 1876 the
State Treasurer.

But when federal troops were removed from the South in 1877 and
Negro voters no longer had protection at the polls, reaction set in. The Ku Klux
Klan began to ride. Voters werre intimidated, tarred and feathered, whipped,
shot down. Black Codes were passed denying civil rights, and some states originated
Grandfather Clauses which said that unless you or your parents had voted before the
Civil War, you could not vote now --- which meant freedom were not eligible. Negro
political power faded in the South. For a brief period during the rise of the
Populist Party of farmers and poor whites, both Democrats and Reublicans again
sought the Negro vote to keep The Populists from becoming powerful. then, from 1883 to
1897, six Negroes were elected as Representatives to Washington. They were:

from Virginia, John M. Langston

from South Carolina, Thomas E. Miller and George W. Murray:

And from North Carolina, James E. O'Hara, Henry P. Cheatham:

And the last of the Southern Representatives, George H. White of
North Carolina, elected in 1897.

When White completed his term in 1901, it was 27 years before
another Negro went to Congress.

One of the outstanding colored politicians was John M. Langston,
Congressman from Virginia, founder of the Law School at Howard
Univerity, and first presidnet of Virginia State College for
Negroes. Widely known as a speaker, Langston, in an address at
Saratoga, New York, in 1876, concerning the use of the ballot,
said some wise things.

Perhaps never in the history of our cuntry was there a time when
the duty of the American voter to consider well and wisely what
vote to cast, wht party to bring to power and support in power,
was so imperative. In discharging our duty in this regard, while
we are fearless, we should be impartial and just. Let us not
make haste to condemn unduly, nor to accept without wise discrimi-
nation the claim of any candidate or party. We are called upon
as intelligent and earnest, patriotic and devoted citizens, to
determine, each for himself, how votes given for the Democratic
or Republican party, will tend to sustain the dignity and power
of the Government, and conserve our free institutions under the
Constitution. Each of us is held responsible to his own
conscience, posterity and God for the wisdom, or folly displayed
in exercising our suffrage --- the most sacred, as it is the
most valuable right which we possess on American soil.

Disfranchised in the South by state laws, trickery, or terror,
no more Negro Congressman came from there Dixie after Langston and
White. But quietly behind the scenes, a practical-minded man
of enormous political power emerged, consulted by national
leaders North and South on all problems relating to the Negro,

He wasa friend of Presidents. That man was the great founder of
Tuskegee Institute, Book T. Washington.

Friends, the individual or race that owns the property, pays the
taxes, possesses the intelligence and substantial character, is
the one which is going to exercise the greatest control in
government, whether he lives in the North or whether he lives in
the South. There is no defense or security for any of us except
in the highest intelligence and development of all. Education must
be digested and assimilated in order to make it significant. The
science, the art, the literature that fails to reach down and bring
the humblest up to the enjoyment of the fullest blessings of our
government is weak, no matter how costly the buildings or apparatus
used, or how modern the methods of instruction employed. The study
of arithmetic that does not result in making men conscientious in
receiving and counting the ballots of their fellow men is faulty.

Unfortunately, the unreconstructed rebels of the South continued to
deny the rights to vote, or failed to count, the ballots of Negro
citizens at the turn of the century. When Charles H. White left
Congress in 1901, it was more than a quarter of a century before we
had there another national representative. In 1928 Oscar DePriest
was elected to Congress from the First Illinois District -- being
the first Northern Negro over to sit in the national legislature.
As the great migrations from the South increased after each war,
and the black populations of our Northern industrial cities grew,
so Negro political power grew. Manicipal judges, city councilmen,
county officials, and state legislators of color from New York to
Los Angeles became not uncommon. From Illinois, Arthur W. Michell

FOLLOWED De Priest to Congress, then came William L. Dawson
serving now. From New York Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was elected
in 1945, and most recently Charles C Diggs of Detroit became the 27th man
of color to sit in Congresss. There should be more -- more
Powells, Dawsons, and Diggses in Washington. More James Watsons and
Bessie Buchanans in state governments as in New York. More Hulan Jacks in more
American city halls as in Manhantton and more judges such as Hivers, Paige, Stevens,
Dickens and JaneBolin on the benches of municipalities across the
nation. And we all -- you, me -- must use our vote wisely and
use it well to elect to all sorts of offices, particularly the
national officies, men who will bring to bear our democratic forces on all public officials
to not only open up -- but to protect --
the ballot boxes of the South -- so that Negro citizens may
vote in Mississippi and Georgia and Alabama and South Carolina
again -- and again sent to Congress from the South black men --

And black women!

Yes, and black women -- representatives of the strength and
calibre of those who served so nobly and so well in the dark and
dangerous days of Reconstruction. Fellow citizens, your ballot
has great value. Use it! When election time comes, to paraphrase
by extension a young Negro leader in the South today, the
Reverend Martin Luther King of Alabama, "If you can't . fly, run!
If you can't run, walk! If you can't walk, crawl -- to the
polls and vote!"

Vote!

Vote!

Vote!

Vote!

Vote!

Vote!

Vote!

Vote! ...... Vote! ...... Vote! ...... Vote! ...... Vote...VOTE!