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…

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.

President, we have a vindication on this floor of inequality as a principle and as a political rule.

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.

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.

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 say he should be equal in rights everywhere; and why not, I ask the Senator from Georgia?

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 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?

I have been excluded from ladies’ cars on railroads.

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.

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.

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…

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.

I would not have my country descend, but ascend.

It must rise to the heights of the Declaration of Independence.

Then and there did we pledge ourselves to the great truth that all men are equal in rights.

And now a Senator from Georgia rises on this floor and denies it.

While pretending to admit it, he would overthrow it.

My bill is an inhibition upon inequality founded upon color.

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.

But the Senator still insists upon his dogma of inequality.

When he pays his money, he is entitled to as much comfort and as much convenience as I am.

If a person is treated with indignity, can he be comfortable?

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.