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Testimony of John H. Burch regarding the Negro Exodus Indexed by:   Subject | Author | Date | Document Type Citation Information:  "Testimony of John H. Burch regarding the Negro Exodus." From Herbert Aptheker, editor, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York, 1951), p. 721. John H. Burch was connected with the New Orleans Louisianian in 1870 and the Baton Rouge Courier in 1871. He served in the Louisiana House and Senate. Question: I want to ask you how the colored women, the wives of these colored men down there, look upon this exodus? John H. Burch: Well, the women have had more to do with it than all the politics and men in the country. These women since reconstruction, have followed their husbands and brothers and all who had a vote, from morning to night, around the parishes demanding that they should vote the Republican ticket, especially if they heard that their husband, or brother, or father, was likely to vote the Democratic ticket. They have been very active since 1868 in all the political movements; they form a large number in all the political assemblages, and they have evidenced a deep interest in all that pertains to politics so far as their husbands and fathers and brothers were concerned; they have always placed their desire that they should vote the Republican ticket on the ground that it was only through the Republican party and the principles of that party that they could secure homes for themselves and educational advantages for their children, and protection in all the rights accorded to them by the Constitution of the nation. And so they have followed up their husbands and brothers and fathers until they have seen their Republican government swept away from under them; and now they have turned their attention to emigration. There is in New Orleans today a committee formed in 1878, that was called then the "committee of five hundred women," of which Mrs. Mary J. Garrett is president; her name is now Mary Jane Nelson—she married this year. Question: Are they colored women? John H. Burch: Yes, sir; they are all colored women. This committee published an address in 1878, that I am very sorry I have not with me now, in which they demanded every right and privilege that the Constitution guarantees to their race, and that they should use every power in their hands to get it. Senate Report 693, 46th Cong., 2nd Sess., part 2, pp. 232-33.