The Senator does not seem to see that any rule excluding a man on account of color is an indignity, an insult, and a wrong; and he makes himself on this floor the representative of indignity, of insult, and of wrong to the colored race.
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 have been excluded from ladies’ cars on railroads.
I should like to ask him, if he will allow me, whether, in his judgment, the colored Representatives from Georgia and South Carolina in the other Chamber ought not on railroads and at hotels to have like rights with himself?
The Senator admits that in the highest council-chamber there is, and should be, perfect equality before the law; but descend into the hotel, on the railroad, within the common school, and there can be no equality before the law.
I say he should be equal in rights everywhere; and why not, I ask the Senator from Georgia?
Very well; and I intend, to the best of my ability, to see that under the institutions of the country he is equal everywhere.
I do not, Sir, for this reason: it is under the institutions of the country that he becomes entitled by law to his seat here; we have no right to deny it to him.
We have received in this Chamber a colored Senator from Mississippi; but according to the rule of the Senator from Georgia we should have put him apart by himself; he should not have sat with his brother Senators.
A substitute can never take the place of equality.
President, we have a vindication on this floor of inequality as a principle and as a political rule.
I see that race once enslaved, for a long time deprived of all rights, and now under existing usage and practice despoiled of rights which the Senator himself is in the full enjoyment of.
I should like to bring home to the Senator that nearly one half of the people of Georgia are now excluded from the equal rights which my amendment proposes to secure; and yet I understand that the Senator disregards their condition, sets…
They may take that responsibility; but I shall take mine, God willing.
Sumner proceeded to explain the bill, which he insisted was in conformity with the Declaration of Independence, and with the National Constitution, neither of which knows anything of the word “white.” Then, announcing that he should do…
I was fully convinced, that, whatever difference there is between the Negro and European in the conformation of the nose and the color of the skin, there is none in the genuine sympathies and characteristic feelings of our common…
Brave Theseus, they were MEN like all before, And human souls in human frames they bore, With you to take their parts in earthly feasts, With you to climb one heaven and sit immortal guests.
There is also a new and kindred art, infinite in value, where the Sun himself becomes artist, with works which mark an epoch.
Such a character deserves the immortality of Art.
Looking at that tranquil countenance, it is easy to imagine the large and various capacities which made him not only painter, but sculptor, architect, musician, poet, discoverer, philosopher, even predecessor of Galileo and Bacon.
But none of his portraits is calculated to give greater pleasure than that of Leonardo da Vinci, which may vie in beauty even with the famous Pomponne.
Under his influence the art assumed new life, so that he became father of the modern school.
Pride and ostentation in the king and the great aristocracy created a demand, which the genius of the age supplied.
Louis the Fourteenth decreed engraving a Fine Art, and established an Academy for its cultivation.
With the younger Drevet closed the classical period of portraits in engraving, as just before had closed the Augustan age of French literature.
At her death the actress could not be buried in consecrated ground; but through Art she has the perpetual companionship of the greatest bishop of France.
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