Monday, April 14, 2008

Not much going on here

I've got the trial coming up in June in the Buchanan County RICO case, and so it consumes much of my waking hours.

But - I have written a few more Wikipedia entries. Some of them are on this partial list of delegates to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901-02. A more complete list of the delegates is here.

That Convention included a high-powered bunch of past, present, or future U.S. Senators, Congressmen, Governors, judges of the Virginia Supreme Court and lower courts, Attorneys General of Virginia, and more than a half-dozen Virginia State Bar Association presidents. It was, so far as I can tell, a collection of the best and the brightest of Virginia's lawyers, for that time. The far Southwest Virginians included Rufus Ayers, Preston W. Campbell, James B. Richmond, and Henry Carter Stuart, plus a Gillespie from Tazewell, a Lincoln from Marion, a Summers from Bristol, and Judge Orr from Lee County. They got together for the main purpose of doing away with the voting rights of black people. They accomplished their purpose by means of the literacy test and poll tax, and the like. When they were done, figuring that black voters would be opposed, they declared the new Constitution ratified, without a vote of the people.

And, racism was only part of it, the other part was to keep down the Republicans and the ex-Readjusters who had been getting the black vote.

I guess I knew all that, but it seems more real to me than before I started picking at it.

1 comment:

Carl Kilo said...

Hi Steve
Read a good article about a Lee Co case with your name all over it.
Thanks for your work on Wiki...Lord knows it needs good creditable writers.