Every question by which the equal rights of all are affected is transcendent.
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.
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I will not see the colored race of this Republic treated with indignity on the grounds assigned by the Senator.
And now, Sir, I pledge myself, so long as strength remains in me, to press this question to a successful end.
He must be equal with me before the law, or the promises of the Declaration of Independence are not yet fulfilled.
I may have whom I please as friend, acquaintance, associate, and so may the Senator; but I cannot deny any human being, the humblest, any right of equality.
Will you take these slaves, as equals, into your families?” Sir, was there ever a more illogical inquiry?
How often shall I say that this is no question of taste,--it is no question of society,--it is a stern, austere, hard question of rights?
I propose to make it impossible for the railroad company to offer an indignity to a colored man more than to the Senator from Georgia.
I say it is the fault of the railroad companies, if they do not provide comforts for all their passengers, and make them equal where they pay equal fare.
But when you exclude persons from the comforts of travel simply on account of color, do you not offer them an indignity?
I will answer the Senator, that no one can condemn more strongly than I do any indignity visited upon a person merely because of color.
If a person is treated with indignity, can he be comfortable?
Let me ask the Senator whether in this world personal respect is not an element of comfort.
When he pays his money, he is entitled to as much comfort and as much convenience as I am.
But the Senator still insists upon his dogma of inequality.
I had thought that all those inequalities were buried under the tree at Appomattox, but the Senator digs them up and brings them into this Chamber.
My bill is an inhibition upon inequality founded upon color.
While pretending to admit it, he would overthrow it.
And now a Senator from Georgia rises on this floor and denies it.
Then and there did we pledge ourselves to the great truth that all men are equal in rights.
It must rise to the heights of the Declaration of Independence.
I would not have my country descend, but ascend.
Show me, therefore, a legal institution, anything created or regulated by law, and I show you what must be opened equally to all without distinction of color.
The taste which the Senator announces he will have free liberty to exercise, selecting always his companions; but when it comes to rights, there the Senator must obey the law, and I insist that by the law of the land all persons without…
The Senator makes a mistake which has been made for a generation in this Chamber, confounding what belongs to society with what belongs to rights.
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