Visitor from the Past

STATES & CITIES

For a Negro to appear on the floor of a legislature south of the Potomac River and converse with its members is, for most Southerners, unthinkable. Yet last week the South Carolina Senate, sitting at Columbia, permitted it to happen. The Negro was Green Coleman, 88-year-old inmate of the Charlotte, N. C. almshouse. Accompanied by Mayor Wearn of Charlotte and a white delegation, he asked to be heard because he was, he claimed, a South Carolina State Senator in the carpetbag days from 1872 to 1876. The South Carolinians were not entirely willing to admit his claims; State records for that period were too hazy. The legislators voted to hear him "but not as an ex-Senator of South Carolina."

Wearing a cutaway, striped trousers and congress gaiters, carrying a silk hat and a hickory stick, "ex-Senator" Coleman went grinning on to the floor, assisted by two young Negroes. There he answered questions: "I was born July 7, 1845 and belonged to Mr. Ely Coleman at Chester." His pay as Senator: "It was regular. I got some more when I voted fuh some of the bills." Prohibition: "Now on this prohibition question I'm all right. . . . Fuh two reasons. Fus' we needs a little liquor and second, dem what wants it gits it whether they buys it or steals it." Why he left the Senate: "Cause o' de Ku Kluxes. I was staying at a colored hotel when word comes to me that de Ku Kluxes wuz killin' all de nigguhs, some by just plain killin', some by drownin' and some by burnin'. Den that night, I found a note under my door. It said, 'Green, when we git back here we don't want to find you here,' and, Cap'n, I'm telling you dey sho' didn' find me."

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