The 'Lily Whites' in Virgnia

African American voting rights are challenged by the Lily-White Movement, but The Planet believes the black community must “do it death” and stick to their convictions.

The Republican Mass-Meeting for the election of delegates to the States and District Conventions of the Republican Party held at Belvidere Hall in this city last Saturday night was particularly significant and for brazen effrontery in openly telling colored voters of this city that they were not wanted, save to ratify any action that the white men of the party had mapped out will stand forth as one of the most remarkable happenings in the city of Richmond. The claim has been made by conservative Democrats and Republicans that the idea was not to get rid of the Negro as a voter, but only to eliminate the ignorant masses and to entrust the ballot to the intelligent property-owing elements of both races. Those colored folks who believed in all this had a rude awakening last Saturday night. Colored men who owned enough property to double and treble that owned by a dozen white men there claiming to be Republicans were ignominiously denied the right of voice and in the general summing up, no attention was even given to their votes. Senator Noel was invited to speak and Democratic white men were counted as Republicans, so we are informed in the general make-up. We cannot understand how a Republican of the Judge L.L. Lewis type could lend either his presence or his voice to such an arrangement. Mr. W.P. Burrell, Grand Worthy Secretary of the True Reformers was insuited and told to sit down under threat of being put out by the police. He represented men like Dr. R. E. Jones, Dr. P.B. Ramsey, Rev. Dr. J. E. Jones, James Hayes, Dr. J. Meade Benson. These are men of standing and respectability. Rev W.L. Taylor is worth approximately fifty thousand dollars or thereabouts, but there is not a bar-room loafer that was treated with more scant courtesy than was he and his associates. They were regarded as interlopers in this new regime. It may be that President Roosevelt and Secretary Taft do not know of the treatment to which the respectable, property-holding Negroes of this State are being treated by their followers. Some effort should be made to acquaint them with the facts and the Republican National Committee should also be advised of the situation. We are surprised that a protest was not made and drafted Saturday night. The only proper way to meet organization is with counter organization. We do not propose to be humiliated by any such processes and if the colored men of Richmond have lost all of their manhood, they should let the country know it. The plan now is to make the colored people the “hewers of wood and the drawers of water” and the white Republicans are to be slated to hold all of the offices worthy of the name. We have long ago learned that there is the Democrat, the Negro-hating Democrat, and the Republican and the Negro-hating Republican. Colored men can support either a Democrat or a Republican according to their respective convictions, but it seems to us that it is time for us to oppose both the Negro-hating Democrat and the Negro-hating Republican, for if there is any difference in creed of these hybrid monstrosities up to this writing, we have failed to discern it. “Lily-Whitism” has run mad in this district and it is time for the better class of Negroes to organize and “do it to death,” or be buried in the grace of oblivion that now awaits our internment. “Awake, arise, or be forever fallen.” -Milton

“The 'Lily Whites' in Virgnia,” Black Virginia: The Richmond Planet, 1894-1909, accessed May 12, 2025, https://blackvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/512.