Lily-White Movement
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Part of a series of articles on Racial segregation |
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The lily-white movement was an all-white faction of the Republican Party in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It battled and usually defeated the biracial element called the Black-and-tan faction. Black leaders gained increasing influence in the party by organizing blacks as an important voting bloc. Conservative whites attempted to eliminate this influence and recover white voters who had defected to the Democratic Party.
The term lily-white movement was coined by Texas Republican leader Norris Wright Cuney, who used the term in an 1888 Republican convention to describe efforts by white conservatives to oust blacks from positions of Texas party leadership and incite riots to divide the party. The term came to be used nationally to describe this ongoing movement as it further developed in the early 20th century, including through the administration of Herbert Hoover. Localized movements began immediately after the war but by the beginning of the 20th century the effort had become national.
According to author and professor Michael K. Fauntroy,
The lily white movement is one of the darkest and underexamined eras of US Republicanism.
Freedmen obtained the vote in the South from Congress in 1867 and joined the Republican Party. During Reconstruction, Union Leagues were formed across the South after 1867 as all-black working auxiliaries of the Republican Party. They were secret organizations that mobilized freedmen to register to vote and to vote Republican. They discussed political issues, promoted civic projects, and mobilized workers opposed to certain employers. Most branches were segregated but there were a few that were racially integrated. The leaders of the all-black units were mostly urban blacks from the North, who had never been slaves. Eric Foner reports:
The activities of the Union League outraged white Democrats. The first Ku Klux Klan targeted violence against black Republican leaders and seriously undercut the Union League.
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