Posted on 01/06/2013 12:37:59 PM PST by Osage Orange
Oklahoma should feel pride about new House speaker..
The Oklahoman Editorial
| Published: January 6, 2013
IN 1908, A.C. Hamlin, R-Guthrie, became the first black man elected to the Oklahoma Legislature. On Tuesday, another black Republican, state Rep. T.W. Shannon of Lawton, will formally become speaker of the House during an organizational session.
Shannon stresses policy and conservative ideology rather than race, but as the first black Oklahoma House speaker — and only black Republican leading a legislative chamber in the country — he'll get national attention reflecting positively on Oklahoma.
The same can't be said of reaction to Hamlin's legislative tenure a century ago.
On Jan. 11, 1909, the Norman Daily Independent ran a piece saying Guthrie deserved to lose its status as Oklahoma's state capital because its citizens had elected “a coal black Negro,” calling Hamlin “the dark spot” of the Legislature.
“We knew Guthrie was a Negro town, but thought there was at least one white republican in the district which could have represented the citizens with some distinction. It would have shown up a little better in their fight to retain the capitol in that city,” the piece stated.
When Hamlin sought re-election, the May 5, 1910 edition of The Oklahoma Guide, a black newspaper, declared he had “served his people well, as well as he could under the circumstances, as well as any republicans could, with such brutal democratic majority.” The paper recommended Hamlin as someone who would “defend the rights of his people against the onslaught of the hayseed members who are blind by colorphobia.”
Other papers took a different view. On June 29, 1910, the Anadarko Daily Democrat had this to say about Hamlin's re-election bid and other races involving black candidates: “Thus the menace of Negro ascendancy on the East side passes the boundary and threatens every citizen of the West side. Six weeks will determine finally whether Oklahoma is to be Negroid or Anglo-Saxon. The Democratic Party will fill the political morgue with Negroes or the Republican Party will fill the legislature of Oklahoma with Negroes.”
To curtail black voting and Republican power, Democrats successfully advanced a constitutional amendment requiring a literacy test to vote and banning anyone from voting who had not done so before January 1, 1866, or was not descended from someone voting before that date.
On Sept. 8, 1910, the New-State Tribune in Oklahoma City approvingly declared the amendment was designed to “check ‘Negro domination'” and “eliminate Negro members of the legislature.”
Sadly, the amendment worked as intended. On Nov. 26, 1910, the Shawnee Daily Herald reported Hamlin lost his race by just 16 votes “when the county election board refused to receive returns from five precincts where a heavy Negro vote was cast.”
Hamlin died in 1912, and there's no way to know what he would think of the modern Democratic and Republican parties. But having been derided as a legislative “black spot,” does anyone doubt that Hamlin would take pride in seeing Shannon preside over a chamber that's still predominantly white?
All Oklahomans should do the same. It's a sign of enormous racial progress that race isn't an issue in Shannon's ascent.
And should you hear a loud whirring noise upon Shannon's leadership election, pay it no mind. That's just the sound of long-dead racists spinning in their graves.
And the Democrats try and tell the public that it’s they that were/are the Party of civil rights....
Great read...thanks for posting. I wish every democrat could read it.
bttt
When Hamlin sought re-election, the May 5, 1910 edition of The Oklahoma Guide, a black newspaper, declared he had "served his people well, as well as he could under the circumstances, as well as any republicans could, with such brutal democratic majority." The paper recommended Hamlin as someone who would "defend the rights of his people against the onslaught of the hayseed members who are blind by colorphobia." ...On June 29, 1910, the Anadarko Daily Democrat had this to say about Hamlin's re-election bid and other races involving black candidates: "Thus the menace of Negro ascendancy on the East side passes the boundary and threatens every citizen of the West side. Six weeks will determine finally whether Oklahoma is to be Negroid or Anglo-Saxon. The Democratic Party will fill the political morgue with Negroes or the Republican Party will fill the legislature of Oklahoma with Negroes."
Good post, and congrats to the new Speaker....but the Oklahoman has this ALL wrong.
This isn’t about color, it never was about color, and it should NEVER be about color (I’m speaking of this election; not 100+ years ago, for God’s sake). Trying to suggest......screw that, STATING that this rights a century-old wrong is political correctness and idiocy.
When.....WHEN......is MLK’s vision of a country where the color of one’s skin doesn’t matter, but the character of the man or woman? Why does it ALWAYS have to be about race, for f*** sake? Lib, conservative, Dem, Pubbie, Independent....doesn’t and shouldn’t matter.
It’s an insult to this man to trumpet his color vs. his ability and talents. I’m so sick of this s*** I could scream.
Since I've lived here...they continually more and more tack to port.
Personally....I agree with you. But I don't expect to see a change...like MLK envisioned. Not with the likes of the current POTUS causing and promoting divisions in the races. Do you?
Scumbag liberals will call this good man an Uncle Tom.
Already have..........
So, the source of the pride is he’s black. How far we’ve fallen.
I wish him best of luck, but I wouldn’t call it pride. Besides, homosexuals have ruined the word, as they have “gay.”
Charley Pride is black.../s
By most accounts the man is a straight up guy...A Conservative, humble guy..that say's what he means...and means what he say's.
We shall see........
It’s possible, but I doubt I’ll see it in my lifetime. The media (including Hollywood and the music industry) will have to change dramatically. I don’t see that happening.
Racism is ALL about $$$$$$$$$$$$$$. We all know it. I never owned a slave, you never owned a slave, our parents, grandparents, etc. never owned slaves. Slavery was banned with the Emancipation Proclamation in the 1860’s and that STILL isn’t good enough. No, we European-heritage Anglo-Saxon whites have to pay the price for bringing their black asses to this colony to work the plantations and farms way back in the day for the rest of our bloody lives.
I’m sick of the lot of ‘em....those who demand “reparations”, those who foment racist attitudes in the black community (Obama, Holder, Sharpton, Jackson, et al), and the fawning, moronic, drooling medidiots who promote the whole damned thing.
Message to black America: I don’t give a damn. I don’t give a damn about your color. I don’t hate you for it, but by God don’t ask me to kowtow or kiss your ass for it. Get OVER yourselves and grow up. Stop sucking off of society and being known as remoras and thugs. Try going back to your spiritual roots that got you through slavery and the toughest of times, and QUIT looking to Gubmint to solve your monumental problems (largely self-inflicted).
If only I had a time machine capable of mass transport.......I’d “right the wrongs” in a heartbeat.
I like that. It's a prideful thing. But the word "pride" has been ruined by the rump riders. If I am happy, I can't say gay anymore. Same thing.
I'm gay as hell........
: )
Can’t say I disagree with much of your post.....
I’m partying.
It has to be said that even antislavery whites - Abraham Lincoln among them - did not know that blacks were equal to whites. You can’t even really prove that with metaphysical certainty even today. I think Thomas Sowell would agree with that statement, even as I agree with everyone else on this board that Thomas Sowell is far smarter than I am. It is an article of Republican faith, an operating Republican assumption - in the teeth of statistical evidence that an awful lot of blacks do an awful lot of dumb things - even more so, it seems, than whites. The entire justification foraffirmative actionquotas is that the apparent difference is due to a disadvantaging non-level playing field.But Sowell would be the first to tell you that members of ethnic groups tend to live up to, or down to, their traditions. Children have a marked tendency to follow in their parents’ footsteps, for better or worse.In that context the black slaves had been systematically denied any chance at equality and their self-respect was undermined; it is hardly a wonder, then, that they seemed incompetent for freedom. They had been acculturated to seem so, and they did - to northern Republicans only just less than to southern Democrats. As recently as the 1950s that disadvantage plagued blacks - and even now, you have blacks who are determined to project a negative image and call it “social justice,” or something of the sort.
The real difference now is that conservatives in the South were left by (the hard left turn of) the Democratic Party, and they faced the choice of political irrelevancy or getting with the program and becoming colorblind Republicans in the mold of Strom Thurmond. Simultaneously the Democratic Party bought the black vote, which had been a reliable Republican vote, with quotas, set-asides, and welfare. All of which were and are cheap substitutes for the kind of work middle class whites have known was indispensable to the possibility of real progress by and for their children. The result has been that the more the white conservative has moved politically to what would have been Martin Luther King’s vision of “content of character” Republican politics, the more blacks moved to Democrat identity politics the mirror image of the old white southern Democrat identity politics.
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