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9. Walters Redux: Detroit, 1905
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152 Z 9 Walters Redux Detroit, 1905 Steward’s lethargy was tonic to Alexander Walters, who stepped up his campaign to reclaim Council leadership as 1904 drew to a close. His December speech before a mixed-race audience in North Carolina was followed by an informal conference of black leaders in Washington, where he embraced an emerging viewpoint on disfranchisement: that the federal government, through Congress, should force southern states to apply suffrage restrictions equally to both races. “What the negro wants and what he contends for is that his franchise be restored to him,” Walters told listeners in Edenton. “If that cannot be done, let the Federal Government see that the revised constitutions in the South be applied to both the white man and the negro.”1 It was a jarring change of both direction and tactics for Walters, who had endorsed restricted suffrage, if reasonably applied, as early as 1900, but had always pushed the threat of reduction in representation—allowed under the Fourteenth Amendment, and proposed in the Crumpacker bill. Reducing southern representation , long the preferred remedy among most black leaders, remained a tool, as he told one white questioner. But by implication, it was now a secondary goal, to be sought only if southern states refused to eliminate discriminatory rules like the hated “grandfather clause.” The Fifteenth Amendment offered a different route, barring any discrimination against voters on account of race. Originally enacted to remove the Fourteenth Amendment “loophole,” under which states refusing to enfranchise black voters could simply accept reduced representation instead, its provisions could legally be enforced by Congress with “appropriate legislation.” (States retained the right to define and restrict the franchise, so long as race was not a criterion.)2 walters redux 153 Theoretically, Congress could order southern states to stop discriminating against black voters, and if they refused, then reduce representation. Yet problems existed with this approach, which Walters presumably did not detail. While considerable (though not majority) support existed for punitive reduction in Congress, simply allowing a state to accept reduced representation was problematic . The South might declare moral victory, since disfranchisement would then be sanctioned as acceptable. No federal election laws existed, the last ones having been repealed in 1893. And state suffrage restrictions, such as the “grandfather clause”— distasteful at best and arguably immoral (or unconstitutional) at worst—would remain on the books; the Supreme Court openly viewed them as “political,” and beyond the judiciary’s reach. Walters amplified his view in Washington, where he analyzed President Roosevelt’s position on the question. “The South is endeavoring to flirt with and deceive the President,” Walters told one hundred “representative colored men” in Calvin Chase’s law office. “The time has come for the negro to act and define a policy that will be effective.” Walters’s strategic movement toward the Fifteenth Amendment may have pleased some listeners. It certainly should have pleased Fortune, who had long argued that reducing southern representation was counterproductive . For different reasons, it should also have pleased those to whom Walters was now reaching out: the emerging Niagara Movement, whose members still advocated reduction of representation under the Fourteenth Amendment.3 But it may not have sat so well with conservative Council members, including Washington, who, whether publicly or secretly, much preferred court lawsuits, and the noble sanction of a definitive ruling, to reduction of representation—or by extension, to any punitive legislative action, perhaps fearing a white backlash against reinstated black voters. The Council’s annual messages had typically accepted reasonable suffrage restrictions but insisted (as in 1902) that restrictions “apply to all citizens alike.” The Council’s legal challenges to disfranchisement had generally been couched in language asserting that state actions violated the letter and spirit of both amendments, as in the cases in Alabama and Louisiana —by denying equal protection of the laws (Fourteenth) and by discriminating on the basis of race (Fifteenth). In his letter to the New York Age in early January, Walters went farther to distance himself from the existing Council by announcing that Congress must pass legislation forcing disfranchising states to apply their laws to both races. While he had once favored punishing states who passed such restrictive laws by “reduction of Southern representation in Congress,” he had now—apparently just since December—changed his mind. “After serious thought I was convinced that [44.222.233.8] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:45 GMT) walters redux 154 the Fifteenth Amendment was passed to strengthen, if not supersede...