Today -100: April 29, 1920: Of black Republicans, impossible candidates, and hunger strikes

The Arkansas Republican state convention refuses to seat some negro delegates. The NYT doesn’t seem to know how many, or how many other black delegates were seated. But all the black delegates leave and hold their own separate convention, vote their own delegates to the National Convention to contest the lily-white delegation, and nominate Josiah Blount, a black school principal, for governor (Blount, born a slave in 1860, will receive 8.4% of the vote).

Virginia negro Republicans also hold a convention, disputing the legitimacy of that state’s all-white convention and also elect an alternative delegation to the national convention.

Harding did receive more votes in the Ohio Republican primary, but Gen. Wood did well too and they will divide the delegates. There were also primaries Tuesday in New Jersey, Illinois, and Massachusetts. The NYT concludes that Harding has been eliminated, he’s “an impossible candidate,” and the Republican presidential battle is nearly tied between Wood and Sen. Hiram Johnson of California.

The Sinn Féin prisoners’ hunger strike spreads to Belfast jail. For days there have been crowds outside Wormwood Scrubs Prison in London cheering on the prisoners there; for the first time they come into conflict with anti-SF demonstrators. Tom Kelly, Lord-Mayor of Dublin, is released from the Scrubs due to ill health; I’m not sure if he was hunger-striking.

A Unionist MP, Ronald McNeill, responds to the US Senate’s concern with Irish independence by bringing up the Philippines, so there. Sir Edward Carson suggests it would be better for each country to leave the other alone.

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s forces shell an Italian torpedo boat destroyer, missing it, although perhaps they were (20) warning shots. Italy is finally sick of the poet-aviator’s shit; its current blockade of Fiume, unlike the previous ones, is more or less effective. D’Annunzio planned to shower pamphlets by plane over the San Remo Conference, replicating his feat over Vienna during the war, but he started too late. The pamphlet would have claimed that his Anti-League of Nations includes Ireland, Egypt, Persia, all of Islam, Croats, Albanians, etc.

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