The Shame of South Carolina

The Planet comments on the disenfranchisement of black voters in South Carolina.

South Carolina’s unconstitutional “Constitutional” Convention has met and adjourned.
The novel character of this body was somewhat discounted by the fact that Mississippi had made the same sort of exhibition of its weakness before. Here was a bold attempt to disfranchise citizens of African descent by legal processes. Here was a declaration to the world that the doctrine of universal suffrage was all wrong and that the government of the many by the few was the only proper method to be practiced in South Carolina.
This is an open confession that free institutions are failures, and that ring-rule and favoritism must forever hold sway in the Southland.
That prince of demagogues, Senator B. R. Tillman made what has been termed the speech of his death, for it will haunt him to his grave.
His misrepresentations and his falsehoods covered up under the verbiage of flowing rhetoric and fervid oratory will forever remain as a grim sentinel showing the depravity of man and demonstrating how far a human being may go in his search for continuation of power, and the increase of notoriety.
Senator Tillman conceded that the enactment of the constitutional provisions on the suffrage question was done to ease conscience.
It was the intention to legalize lawlessness. Had he consulted history or read ethics, he would have arrived at the conclusion that it was and is impossible for this to be done.
This mongrel document, the work of this unconstitutional “Constitutional Convention” will react upon the very children of those who conceived and put it into execution.
The Scriptures have specified the only true way to a realization of happiness.
It is not by deception and fraud, or by making the people of a whole state a party to criminal act.
The people of South Carolina have not as yet through their properly accredited representatives framed a constitution.
A ring controlled by Senator Tillman has done so. In his speech, he gave the same reasons that the thief gives for relieving a passer-by, the robber gives for robbing a citizen, the burglar gives for looting a bank, the murderer gives for slaying his victims. He pleads justification, and in so doing makes the alleged tool the responsible party while the principal who caused the act to be done is allowed to go “unwhipt of justice” unpunished by the rigors of the law which he has put into operation.
The citizen of African descent smiles at the frantic efforts of this bourbon to further humiliate and disfranchise us. We are beyond the reach of his powerful arm, and know that all his labor is in vain.
On with the persecution, on with the disfranchisement, on with the torrent of undeserved abuse! We stood two hundred and fifty years of the most galling slavery known to mankind; we can weather all of the onerous laws you may see fit to crowd upon your statute-books.
Wrong-doing carries with it punishment. Ruinous race-legislation reacts upon those who put it into operation and while our enemies may be throttling us in the field of political endeavor, we shall find industrial life-eternal in the school, the field, the workshop of this country.
You may attempt to check our growth in South Carolina, we will yet reach our full measure of citizenship in other sections of our great land and the reaction will be so pronounced and telling that the action of today will either be a dead-letter or posterity will rise up and with a wave of indignation wipe them from the statutes of the state which they have so ling contaminated.

“The Shame of South Carolina,” Black Virginia: The Richmond Planet, 1894-1909, accessed December 11, 2025, https://blackvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/1475.