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- Description is exactly "These are newspaper articles relating to the Lauderdale County Republican party. Florence historian Lee Freeman notes: "Though there were a few local blacks who voted Democrat, after the Civil War and until FDR's New Deal of the 1930s courted them away, most African-Americans (across the nation) voted Republican because the Democratic Party had been the party of slavery and secession while the Republican Party was the party of Lincoln, emancipation and civil rights. After the war, in the 1870s, the heavily Democratic Lauderdale County had a Republican Executive Committee and, briefly, in 1874 a newspaper, the Florence Republican. The earliest known Executive Committee chairman was Florence native and former Unionist Judge Thomas T. Allington, in 1872; that year two or three local blacks were nominated for state offices in the party. In 1874 two local blacks unsuccessfully ran for local offices on the Republican ticket: barber James Goin (1838-aft. 1892) ran for probate judge and barber William Baugh ran for sheriff.
For much of the 1890s respected black educator Prof. Young A. Wallace (1848-1937) served as chairman of Lauderdale County's Republican Executive Committee; in July of 1895 white citizen Felix G. Lambeth insisted that he was chairman however upon an investigation of the evidence it was shown that Wallace had been legally elected chairman and Lambeth withdrew his claim. In 1890 Prof. Wallace and several other local blacks, along with several local whites, served as delegates to the Republican district convention in Decatur. In April of 1900 Wallace and black grocer Jake Wytch (1848-1927) served with several whites as delegates to the state Republican convention in Montgomery. By August of 1896 there was apparently some dissension in the party as two separate county conventions were held, the mostly white convention at the Opera House and the mostly black convention led by Wallace at the Court House. The Florence Herald reported that "it was evident that a strong effort would be made by those opposed to Wallace to wrest his authority from him" but "it was also evident that Wallace had a cinch on the colored brother and that the colored brother was largely in the majority." Currently I don't know how all of this played out.""
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