Fifty Years of Freedomwith matters of vital importance to both the white and colored people of the United States
been done to humiliate us, it is now demanding segregation, is now insisting upon restricting the rights of colored people to live in certain prescribed sections of communities only. And it has become so emboldened, so insolently aggressive that it is demanding segregation among the employees of the General Government itself. And its demand is being acceded to. Segregation, as a matter of fact, has already begun in some of the Departments of the Government. A bill recently introduced into Congress makes it a criminal offense to mix the races—to have white and colored clerks working together in the same room. For nearly a half century white and colored clerks have worked side by side, and nothing was thought of it; but now through this insane desire to humiliate a race, to impress it more and more with its inferiority, it is now proposed to make it a crime, not under laws enacted by Negro-hating Southern legislatures, but by the National Government itself, which is supposed to represent all the people, and to represent equality of rights for all the people. That prejudice is increasing; that more and more the effort is being made, and in ever-widening areas, to hedge us about with limitations, with restrictions which are not imposed upon other elements of the population, is manifest to any one whose eyes are open to what is going on in the country, not in one section only, but in all sections.

V. At the end of these fifty years, we find nearly all the rights guaranteed to us under the constitution, especially under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, practically nullified in a large section of the country. In the South we have been disfranchised. We have no rights, civil or political, which the white man is bound to respect. The only good Negro in the estimation of the dominant sentiment of the South to-day after fifty years of freedom, is the Negro who knows his place, and who is willing to keep his place of subjection, of subordination to the white man.

7VI. At the end of fifty years, in spite of the facts just narrated, with a full knowledge of the gross injustice from which the colored man is suffering, the rest of the white people of the country, as a whole, are found standing silently by looking on while this cruel and relentless warfare against the race is going on, with only occasionally a word of protest, or of mild remonstrance. The great mass of the white people in other sections of the Union, seemingly, cares nothing about what treatment is accorded to us. They don't seem to think that it is a matter about which they need to concern themselves. If there is any feeling at all it is rather one of sympathy with the oppressor.


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