To educate them in separate schools tends to beget and intensify it in their young minds, and so to perpetuate it to future generations.
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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Children, naturally, are not affected by this prejudice of race or color.
We see neither reason nor justice in this discrimination.
Yet, while the fathers may sit together in those high places of honor and trust, the children are required by law to be educated apart.
And custom is now fully reconciled at this capital to the seating side by side of white and colored people in the railway car, the jury-box, the municipal and Government offices, in the city councils, and even in the Halls of the two…
The experience of this community for the last few years has fully demonstrated that the association of different races, in their daily occupations and civic duties, is as consistent with the general convenience as it is with justice.
That they recognize and tend to perpetuate a cruel, unreasonable, and unchristian prejudice, which has been and is the source of untold wrong and injustice to that class of the community which we represent, is ample reason for their…
That condition of things was a part of the legacy of Slavery.
The laws creating the present system of separate schools for colored children in this District were enacted as a temporary expedient to meet a condition of things which has now passed away.
From our vantage-ground here we must strike it, and, according to our power, destroy it.
Everywhere throughout the region lately cursed by Slavery this dark prejudice still lingers and lowers.
If it should be passed, thus shorn,--I say it, Sir, because I must say it,--it will bring disgrace upon Congress.
What we do here will be an example in distant places.
Strike out this provision, and you will say to the children of this District: “There is a prejudice of color which we sanction; continue it; grow up with it in your souls.” And worse still, the prejudice which you sanction will extend from…
He has equality only when he comes into your common-school and finds no exclusion there on account of his skin.
His right is to equality, and not to equivalency.
You may give him what is sometimes called an equivalent in another school; but this is not equality.
A great protection to the colored child, and a great assurance of his education, will be that he is educated on the same benches and by the same teachers with the white child.
You disown distinctions of sect: why keep up those of color?
Every child, white or black, has a right to be placed under precisely the same influences, with the same teachers, in the same school-room, without any discrimination founded on his color.
It is not enough to give him a separate school, where he may have the same kind of education with the white child.
Having already accorded equal rights at the ballot-box, I insist upon his equal right in the school-room also.
With what consistency can you deny to the child equal rights in the school-room and then give him equal rights at the ballot-box?
You should not begin life with a rule that sanctions a prejudice.
If there be any argument in favor of the provision in these other cases, allow me to say that it is stronger in the school-room, inasmuch as the child is more impressionable than the man.
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