Washington Bee, 18 June 1904.
Republican Party
Grand marshal Suggs leads a thousand marchers.
This letter to the editor of the New Berne Daily Times highlights a Republican celebration in Wilson in September 1872. Reconstruction was in full swing with all its promise of interracial cooperation, and Grand Marshal Washington Suggs led a parade through the streets of downtown.
New Berne Daily Times, 20 September 1872.
Vick and Cheatham certified as convention delegates.
In May 1904, Rocky Mount postmaster George W. Robbins and John D. Grimsley certified former United States Congressman Henry P. Cheatham and Samuel H. Vick as delegates to the National Republic Convention in Chicago. Cheatham and Vick represented North Carolina’s Second Congressional District.
An anonymous reader shared this image. Thank you.
Voting fraud alleged in Wilson County.
The Carolina Era, 5 September 1872.
An anonymous letter writer complained of attempts by Democrats to lead astray African-Americans Republican voters in Black Creek township.
Recommended reading, no. 11.
I’m overdue for a re-reading of Race and Politics in North Carolina 1872-1901, a 43 year-old classic.
Eric Anderson’s monograph focuses on North Carolina’s so-called “Black Second” Congressional district — one of the most remarkable centers of Black political influence in post-Reconstruction, late nineteenth-century America. Though the work only touches lightly on Samuel H. Vick, it provides indispensable context for his life and work.
Afro-American delegates to the Republican Convention.
Saint Paul (MN) Appeal, 18 June 1904.
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Samuel H. Vick was one of two African-American delegates from North Carolina to the 1904 Republican National Convention. The other was Henry Plummer Cheatham, former Second District Representative to the United States Congress.
Populist vs. Republican.
Up until he killed his wife, Samuel Vick‘s sister Nettie Vick Jones, — A. Wilson Jones enjoyed a reputation as a gifted, if wily, orator.
Wilson Advance, 25 October 1894.
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- Jeremiah Scarboro — Jeremiah Scarborough, a Baptist minister and white supremacy apologist, as well as Populist politician.
Hagans reports on the Republican delegation.
Farmer & Mechanic (Raleigh, N.C.), 2 September 1902.
It’s not entirely clear, but this report seems to claim that Jack Sharp, a former Wilson County resident, boarded a train to unseat the county’s representatives on their way to the state Republican convention and to appoint a new set. William S. Hagans, the Wayne County native who provided the report, was African-American, and my guess is that the original delegates contained Black members.
Vick presents a notice to the Republican convention.
Wilson Daily Times, 14 June 1920.
The Republican Party’s 1920 convention in Chicago nominated Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge for president and vice-president. Samuel H. Vick, long active in Republican politics and well-known from the battles over his appointment as Wilson’s postmaster, formerly registered his protest against North Carolina’s exclusion of African-Americans from its deliberations.
Eating the hog is the thing uppermost in their minds.
In 1924, Samuel H. Vick, elbowed out of formal political activity, clapped back at a Greensboro, North Carolina, newspaper’s op-ed piece about African-Americans and the state Republican Party.
Wilson Daily Times, 23 September 1924.
Editor Daily Times:
In regard to the editorial appearing [on] the Negro and the Republican party in this state, we wish to state that the “Hog Combine” has no desire to carry North Carolina for the Republican party.
Eating the hog is the thing uppermost in their minds, and they eat so much until they have nightmares.
Control of national Republican patronage is their sole ambition.
The party who wrote the editorial in the Greensboro Daily News is evidently a member of the “Hog Combine.”
If this is not true it is rather strange that he should dictate the policy of the Republican party in North Carolina in regard to the Negro.
The Negro has been politically asleep for the past twenty years, but he is arousing now and will be heard from.
We have no desires or ambitions politically, but we have an interest in our people politically as well as otherwise.
This explains our activity in the matter if the little part we have taken in such things can be called by that name.
Since we were mentioned personally in the editorial, we wish to make this statement: If I have incurred “a legacy of everlasting race rancor and hatred by a temporary (ten years) tenure of a Wilson Post Office” it has never been shown or demonstrated by the people of Wilson. They were my friends then and have shown their friendship ever since. Whatever I may have or possess is due largely to their friendship which this editor calls race rancor and hatred.
In regard to being invited into the party we wish to say that the Anglo-African does not have to be invited into the Republican party. He has no doubt been too loyal. It was the Anglo-Saxon who was invited into the ranks of the party. He came in and took possession and shut the door on the Anglo-African, but the original Republicans are coming back in spite of the “Hog Combine,” believing what is good for the white man is good for the negro with equal intelligence.
Respectfully, S.H. VICK