Today -100: August 29, 1919: I am tired out and am going fishing

Monroe Trotter, “Boston negro” of the National Equal Rights League, appears before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and demands a racial equality amendment to the Peace Treaty. He warns that if the injustice and oppression in the US continues, “our own country may not be free from a menace to the world’s peace.” Joseph Thomas of the National Race Congress asks the Committee to ensure that the US rather than France gets the League of Nations mandate for Kamerun. American blacks would go to Kamerun as teachers, policemen, etc. The Democrats on the Committee seem to have boycotted this session, and the Republicans didn’t bother to ask any questions of the black witnesses.

A mob in Ocmulgee, Georgia shoot a black man, Eli Cooper, in a black church, which they then burn down, along with other nearby black churches. Cooper was alleged to have been the leader of a plot for negroes to rise out and wipe out the white population.

Ole Hanson, Seattle’s anti-labor mayor, resigns, issuing an official statement: “I am tired out and am going fishing.”

South African Prime Minister Louis Botha, who led the Boer forces against Britain during the Boer War, dies at 56 of a heart attack following a bout of Spanish Flu. He will be replaced by Jan Smuts.

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