On May 13, 1902, the Guardian sponsored a rally at Faneuil Hall in support of the Fourteenth Amendment and congressional investigation of southern disfranchisement. The event called itself the Crumpacker Rally in honor of the Indiana Republican Edgar D. Crumpacker, who wanted Congress to reduce southern representation in those states where Black citizens were denied the right to vote. Crumpacker, and fellow Pennsylvania Republican Marlin E. Olmsted, invoked Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which allowed Congress to reduce representation in those states that denied citizens’ rights. Olmsted introduced this resolution on January 3, 1901, less than three months after Republicans took control of the White House and both houses of Congress in the 1900 elections.
Crumpacker had worked on the resolution months before the presidential election, mainly in response to widespread white violence against Black voters across the South. In 1898, for instance, mere months after Frazier Baker’s murder, five hundred white North Carolinians, angry at the predominantly Black city of Wilmington for electing Republicans to the state legislature, stormed the town hall, seized control of the city council, and attacked Black people and their businesses in a violent political coup. Although the new, white Democratic Wilmington government clearly violated the Fourteenth Amendment, neither state nor Federal officials intervened, allowing the “Old North State” to fall under Democratic control with little attention outside of the Black community.
As a GOP loyalist, Crumpacker recognized that suppression of the Black vote meant continued Republican losses across the South. And as chair of the Congressional Census Committee, he was also aware how election results in southern districts reflected white violence and voter suppression rather than the will of Black voters, most of whom were either disfranchised through revised state constitutions, or violently suppressed by white mobs. Crumpacker designed the legislation in early 1899, but he tabled it in June 1900 out of respect for the incoming McKinley administration—he wanted to avoid the inevitable white backlash that could cost the party either the White House or Congress in November. Even as Crumpacker’s proposal to implement the Fourteenth Amendment spread across the South, white Democrats cockily declared that rumors of Federal protection for Black voters were just that. As the Richmond Dispatch reported, “we do not think that the south need lose any sleep over Mr. Crumpacker’s threat.”