But when you exclude persons from the comforts of travel simply on account of color, do you not offer them an indignity?

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.

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.

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?

Will you take these slaves, as equals, into your families?” Sir, was there ever a more illogical inquiry?

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.

He must be equal with me before the law, or the promises of the Declaration of Independence are not yet fulfilled.

And now, Sir, I pledge myself, so long as strength remains in me, to press this question to a successful end.

I will not see the colored race of this Republic treated with indignity on the grounds assigned by the Senator.

Every question by which the equal rights of all are affected is transcendent.

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…

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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…

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

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

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.

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…

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

Such is the irresistible logic of his emancipation.

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

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