As the 1874 campaign for governor and state legislature began in Alabama, the Pike County Democratic Party’s platform gave supporters this guidance for how to treat white Republicans:
[Nothing] is left to the white man’s party but social ostracism of all those who act, sympathize or side with the negro party, or who support or advocate the odious, unjust, and unreasonable measure known as the civil rights bill; and that from henceforth we will hold all such persons as enemies of our race, and we will not in the future have intercourse with them in any of the social relations of life.1
Citations
- 1 : Quoted in Glenn M. Linden, Voices from the Reconstruction Years, 1865–1877 (Harcourt Brace/Cengage 1998), 201.