Once Slavery was justified by color, as now the denial of Equal Rights is justified; and the reason is as little respectable in one case as in the other.
Charles Sumner
The Public Record
Charles Sumner was an American lawyer and statesman who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1851 until his death in 1874. Before and during the American Civil War, he was a leading American advocate for the abolition of slavery, and after the war he was a key figure in the Reconstruction era, during which he and other Radical Republicans successfully fought to end slavery and ensure basic rights for Black Americans. He continued advocating for racial equality until his death, lobbying in his final days for a civil rights bill that served as a model for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Historians credit Sumner with coining the phrase "equality before the law," which he first used as part of an early attempt to integrate Boston's public school system.
gutenberg.org
Is it a Republic of Equal Laws, or an Oligarchy of the Skin?
Is this a white man’s government or is it a government of “all men,” as declared by our fathers?
Shall that Equality before the Law, which is the best part of citizenship, be denied to those who do not happen to be white?
And shall those Equal Rights promised by the great Declaration be sacrificed to a prejudice?
The God-given color of the African is a constant offence to the disdainful white, who, like the pretentious lord, asking Hotspur for prisoners, can bear nothing so unhandsome “betwixt the wind and his nobility.” This is the whole case.
No Roman monument, with its Siste, viator, to the passing traveller, no “labor of an age in pilèd stones,” can match in grandeur that simple burial.
In that common trench the young hero rests, symbolizing the great Equality for which he died.
Plainly it shows how conduct and character are realities, while other things are but accidents.
As in birth, so in death are all alike,--beginning with the same nakedness, and ending in the same decay; nor do worms spare the white body more than the black.
To insult the dead is easier, although condemned by Christian precept and heathen example.
But I do not forget that only recently a colored officer of the National Army was treated with indignity at the communion-table.
How strange that any institution of learning or science, any church, or any cemetery should set up a discrimination so utterly inconsistent with correct principle!
It is with humiliation that I am forced to insist upon the same equality in other public institutions of learning and science,--also in churches, and in the last resting-places of the dead.
Already a component part of our political corporation, they must become part of the educational corporation also, with Equality as the supreme law.
But just in proportion as they are weak, and not yet recovered from the degradation in which they have been plunged, does the Republic owe its completest support and protection.
If to him that hath is given, according to the way of the world, it is not doubted that to him that hath not there is a positive duty in proportion to the necessity.
This decisive consideration completes the irresistible argument for the common school as the equal parent of all without distinction of color.
For him there is no assurance of education except in the common school, where he will be under the safeguard of all.
That the two must differ is seen at once; and that this difference is adverse to the colored child is equally apparent.
No matter what the temporary disposition, the separate school will not flourish as the common school.
But even where a separate school is planted, it is inferior in character, buildings, furniture, books, teachers: all are second-rate.
The common school is important to all; but to the colored child it is a necessity.
It is not enough that all should be taught alike; they must all be taught together.
There is no separate ballot-box: there should be no separate school.
Politicians like Charles Sumner
