Aaron Harding Quotes

The post–Civil War Radical Republicans, as a group, cared very little for the black vote until they came to believe that it would help to secure their position ... against a Democratic resurgence. Once convinced that they would profit from the black vote, they passed the Fifteenth Amendment

Negro suffrage is political arsenic. If it is not, why do not the free States open wide their throats and gulp down the graceful and invigorating draught?

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.

By God, that means nigger citizenship …. That will be the last speech Lincoln will ever make.

If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party.

It did not improve the feeling of the defeated classes of the South to contemplate, at first, the amendments of the Constitution of the United States, which not only established the freedom of the slave, but established his citizenship beyond question, and putting into his hands the ballot, making him the political equal of his former owner. Objecting not only to the law, but to that practice under it, … the former master class became greatly exasperated, and resolving, if possible, to overcome this condition of things, organized bands of "White-liners," "Ku-Klux," and "Bull-dozers," and entered upon that systematic warfare upon Republicans, white and colored, which, resulting in violence, intimidation and murder, has necessitated the use of the army to maintain the peace, and protect the loyal people of the South against that domestic violence, which at times seemed to threaten utter destruction, interfering even with legislatures, and disturbing the operations of the Government.

American women who know the history of this country will always resent the fact that American men chose to enfranchise Negroes fresh from slavery before enhancing their wives and mothers.

The division of the vote is hardly to be considered at this time. It is the duty of the Negro to vote for the Republican party. It will be quite time to consider the advisability of dividing the vote … when shotguns are dropped from the assassins hands, when mob fires cease to be funeral pyres, when the accident of birth-nature ceases to amount to a crime, when color and oppression are no longer synonymous, when the laws of this fair land are administered to all alike. The Democratic party has spoken. It is not misunderstood.

Votes for women didn’t come until the 1920’s. Votes for Blacks didn’t effectively come until the 1960’s.

That means negro citizenship … By God, that is the last speech he will ever make.

Until the Negro votes on a large scale, we will have to rely more and more on mass direct action as the one realistic political weapon.

Let the black man vote when he is fit to vote; prohibit the white man from voting when he is unfit to vote.

It is also unsatisfactory to some, that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.

The great majority of negroes in the South who do not vote, do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could.

I tried to make the point to the [Nixon] White House that, as a party, we needed to demonstrate that we cared and were concerned about votes from African-Americans and Hispanics. I don't know where we lost track after Abraham Lincoln.

History did not end in 1965. Largely because of the Voting Rights Act, voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.

Negroes could not vote in those days. When I went to Massachusetts and ran for office, it was the first time in my life that I ever voted.

I am not ... in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them ... to intermarry with white people.

I demand ... the franchise for all loyal citizens

The northern states, most of them, do not permit negroes to vote. Some of them have repeatedly and lately pronounced against it. Therefore, even if it were defensible as a principle for the Central Government to absorb by amendment the power to control the action of the States in such a matter, would it not be futile to ask three-quarters of the States to do for themselves and others, by ratifying such an amendment, the very thing most of them have already refused to do in their own cases?

The Negro has not only come into the Democratic Party, but the Negro has come into control of the Democratic Party.

The United States was created for white people …. When a negro has learned to read, he ceases to work.

His aim is to place the Negroes on equality with the white man—to have him eat at the same table, sit in the same pew, and vote at the same ballot box. He would appear to forget altogether the Creator himself made a distinction when he established the immovable barrier of color between the races.

The fact that no lynchings of negroes occur in States where the Republican party is in power warrants us in the belief that these crimes are committed for political reasons

The Ballot or the Bullet