By R.E. Powell
Raleigh, Dec. 6—White Republicans who favor somebody else as federal judge and Colonel Isaac M. Meekins are disposed to think that the new assault of negro republicans on the Colonel may prove the irony of political fate in North Carolina.
A letter has come to the correspondent of this paper which is being sent to the attorney general of the United States. It has taken the form of a petition from negroes in Salisbury, High Point, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Durham, and Wilmington against the appointment of Colonel Meekins and some of the negroes who are presenting it are graduates of Amherst college, the President’s institution. Here is a portion of the protest after the writers denominate Mr. Meekins a demagogue:
“In the last campaign in which he was a farcical candidate for governor of North Carolina on the so-called Republican ticket, newspaper accounts reported him as having boasted that he voted and worked in the 1900 campaign to disenfranchise the negroes of North Carolina. This in the face of the fact that the negroes’ right to vote was in accordance to the constitution, and the amendment thereof, which was bought and paid for in the price of human blood. When President Lincoln called for 275,000 negro volunteers to serve in the army against the Confederacy, that number responded immediately. Out of that number, 110,000 of them were killed in action, died from wounds or disease incident to the war. After the war the negro was given his constitutional right to vote, as an act of gratitude on the part of the American people. Mr. Meekins, candidate for Judge of the United States Court whose chief function is the proper interpretation of the constitution, boasts that he worked and voted to tear down a portion of it—its 15th Amendment.”
The letter further recites that when the Linney case was up “when referred to in person by Mr. Henry Lincoln Johnson as his friend, Mr. Meekins roughly replied there to him in his face something like this: “Don’t you dare call me your friend. I am not your friend and don’t you call me one.” This was so uncalled for and unbecoming any man who would ever feign to be a gentleman, most especially so in the face of the fact that every normal person wants a friend, so much so that in the frailty of man’s love for his own neighbor that man seek the friendship of the dog, a friendship made famous the world over by Senator Vest’s immortal eulogy of the dog’s nature to be a friend to man.” The letter goes further in its attestation of party love, but says that the writers voted for only one Republican, President Coolidge, the remainder of the ticket cast being for Democrats. “We are told that Mr. Meekins stated publicly that he did not want a negro to vote for him to be governor of North Carolina,” the letter says. “How unpatriotic! How demagogic and insulting even to the sacred covenants of the constitution!”
There is more of this. It is a fierce letter but the Colonel will probably be able to get closer to the throne than this message will. It is horribly overdrawn, perhaps not a statement which is correctly made as to the Meekins attitude. He never has “boasted that he worked and voted to tear down” a portion of the federal constitution. When he was attacked by his Democratic opponent for his identification with the Russell administration and for his attack on the constitutional amendment, he did retort that as a sample of Democratic recklessness in his speech and of partisan unfairness these facts: He did not even vote in the 1896 election, being then newly moved to another part of the state from that in which he was born and not able to register. As for the constitutional amendment, he voted for it. He neither worked for it nor boasted of his attitude. But he did think his opponents should represent him fairly. Mr. Meekins understood of course that Mr. McLean was misinformed. Later in the campaign Mr. McLean introduced testimony to show that colonel Meekins had something during that canvas attacked the Democratic party for its amendment campaign.
The Republican candidate’s attitude toward the negroes was whimsical rather than antagonistic. He said the Democrats had abused the Republicans for 50 years for having the negro Republicans all vote the Republican ticket. As for him, he would take a rest—let them vote the Democratic ticket as he said they already were doing. This letter seems to prove what he said. They did not vote for Meekins, notwithstanding, which he received the best vote of all the Republican candidates.
The negroes have felt powerfully good over the fight made on Frank A. Linney and this is a repeater.
From the front page of the Durham Morning Herald, Sunday, Dec. 7, 1924
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn84020730/1924-12-07/ed-1/seq-1/#words=DECEMBER+7%2C+1924
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