In the 1928 presidential election between Governor Al Smith of New York and Herbert Hoover , Aswell spoke on KWKH radio in Shreveport against Hoover 's support for desegregation of the American South . The speech was prompted by allegations made by Governor Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi that Hoover in 1927 had danced with Mary Booze , the first African-American member of the Republican National Committee . The questionable rendezvous supposedly occurred when Hoover , as United States Secretary of Commerce , visited Mound Bayou , Mississippi , while touring damage from the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 . Bilbo referred to Booze as " a negress . " Hoover 's southern supporters , most of them business-oriented Democrats , pointed in reply to racial intermarriage which occurred in Smith 's New York
Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
James Benjamin Aswell