Charles Sumner

This denial is memorable, not only from the rank, but the character of the victim.

And the same insulting ostracism shows itself in other institutions of science and learning, also in the church, and in the last resting-place on earth.

But among us little children are turned away and forbidden at the door of the common school, because of the skin.

Important as it is to testify and to vote, life is not all contained even in these possessions.

It is, All are equal before the law,--not merely before the law in two cases, but before the law in all cases, without limitation or exception.

But this plain requirement is not satisfied, logically or reasonably, by these two concessions, so that when they are recognized all others are trifles.

Besides the right to testify and the right to vote, there are other rights without which Equality does not exist.

The denial of any right is a wrong darkening the enjoyment of all the rest.

Such was the impudent behest of Slavery, prolonged after it was reported dead.

More than four millions of people, whose only offence was a skin once the badge of Slavery, were shut out from the court-room, and also from the ballot-box, in open defiance of the great Declaration of our fathers, that all men are equal…

Cruelly, he was not permitted to testify in court; most unjustly, he was not allowed to vote.

Ceasing to be a slave, he became a man, whose foremost right is Equality of Rights.

Such is the irresistible logic of his emancipation.

No longer a chattel, he is a man,--justly entitled to all that is accorded by law to any other man.

No human being can call himself master, with impious power to separate husband and wife, to sell child from parent, to shut out the opportunities of religion, to close the gates of knowledge, and to rob another of his labor and all its…

If not in body, at least in spirit, or as a ghost making the country hideous, the ancient criminal yet lingers among us, insisting upon the continued degradation of a race.

Again the barbarous tyranny stalks into this Chamber, denying to a whole race the Equal Rights promised by a just citizenship.

PRESIDENT, Slavery, in its foremost pretensions, reappears in the present debate.

There is a mass of important testimony from all parts of the country, from Massachusetts as well as Georgia, showing the absolute necessity of Congressional legislation for the protection of Equal Rights, which I think ought to be laid…

In the debate that ensued he declared his desire to vote for amnesty; but he insisted that this measure did not deserve success, unless with it was justice to the colored race.

How, Sir, will an Act of Amnesty be received when accompanied with denial of justice to the colored race?

I know that he will say, “Pass the Amnesty Bill first, and then take care of the other.” I say, Better pass the two together; or if either is lost, let it be the first.

It is not enough to stand by those who have fought against us; he must also stand by those who for generations have borne the ban of wrong.

It is not enough to be generous; he must learn to be just.

But here are the rights of a whole people, not merely the rights of an individual, of two or three or four, but the rights of a race, recognized as citizens, voting, helping to place the Senator here in this Chamber, and he turns upon them…