More than four millions of people, whose only offence was a skin once the badge of Slavery, were shut out from the court-room, and also from the ballot-box, in open defiance of the great Declaration of our fathers, that all men are equal…
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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Such was the impudent behest of Slavery, prolonged after it was reported dead.
The denial of any right is a wrong darkening the enjoyment of all the rest.
Besides the right to testify and the right to vote, there are other rights without which Equality does not exist.
But this plain requirement is not satisfied, logically or reasonably, by these two concessions, so that when they are recognized all others are trifles.
It is, All are equal before the law,--not merely before the law in two cases, but before the law in all cases, without limitation or exception.
Important as it is to testify and to vote, life is not all contained even in these possessions.
But among us little children are turned away and forbidden at the door of the common school, because of the skin.
And the same insulting ostracism shows itself in other institutions of science and learning, also in the church, and in the last resting-place on earth.
Of blameless life, he was an example of integrity.
He was poor, but could not be bought or bribed.
Only in his coffin was the ban of color lifted, and the dead statesman admitted to that equality which is the right of all.
If Frederick Douglass and Oscar James Dunn could be made to suffer, how much must others be called to endure!
Do you doubt this constant, wide-spread outrage, extending in uncounted ramifications throughout the whole land?
The evidence is on your table in numerous petitions.
And there is other evidence, already presented by me, showing how individuals have suffered from this plain denial of equal rights.
Who that has a heart can listen to the story without indignation and shame?
Who with a spark of justice to illumine his soul can hesitate to denounce the wrong?
Who that rejoices in republican institutions will not help to overthrow the tyranny by which they are degraded?
I do not use too strong language, when I expose this tyranny as a degradation to republican institutions,--ay, Sir, in their fundamental principle.
Not because it declares separation from a distant kingly power; but because it announces the lofty truth that all are equal in rights, and, as a natural consequence, that just government stands only on the consent of the governed,--all of…
Such is the soul of republican institutions, without which the Republic is a failure, a name and nothing more.
Call it a Republic, if you will, but it is in reality a soulless mockery.
Equality in rights is not only the first of rights, it is an axiom of political truth.
Therefore it is not stating an axiom to announce grandly that only white men are equal in rights; nor is it stating an axiom to announce with the same grandeur that all persons are equal in rights, but that colored persons have no rights…
Politicians like Charles Sumner
