Surely the race enslaved for generations has suffered enough without being doomed to this prolonged proscription.
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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Will not the Republic, redeemed by most costly sacrifice, insist upon justice to the children of the land, making the common school the benign example of republican institutions, where merit is the only ground of favor?
The prejudice of color is nursed, when it should be stifled.
The Pharisaism of race becomes an element of character, when, like all other Pharisaisms, it should be cast out.
Better even than knowledge is a kindly nature and the sentiment of equality.
Children learn by example more than by precept.
How precious the example which teaches that all are equal in rights!
But this can be only where all commingle in the common school as in common citizenship.
There is no separate ballot-box: there should be no separate school.
It is not enough that all should be taught alike; they must all be taught together.
The common school is important to all; but to the colored child it is a necessity.
But even where a separate school is planted, it is inferior in character, buildings, furniture, books, teachers: all are second-rate.
No matter what the temporary disposition, the separate school will not flourish as the common school.
That the two must differ is seen at once; and that this difference is adverse to the colored child is equally apparent.
For him there is no assurance of education except in the common school, where he will be under the safeguard of all.
This decisive consideration completes the irresistible argument for the common school as the equal parent of all without distinction of color.
If to him that hath is given, according to the way of the world, it is not doubted that to him that hath not there is a positive duty in proportion to the necessity.
But just in proportion as they are weak, and not yet recovered from the degradation in which they have been plunged, does the Republic owe its completest support and protection.
Already a component part of our political corporation, they must become part of the educational corporation also, with Equality as the supreme law.
It is with humiliation that I am forced to insist upon the same equality in other public institutions of learning and science,--also in churches, and in the last resting-places of the dead.
How strange that any institution of learning or science, any church, or any cemetery should set up a discrimination so utterly inconsistent with correct principle!
But I do not forget that only recently a colored officer of the National Army was treated with indignity at the communion-table.
To insult the dead is easier, although condemned by Christian precept and heathen example.
As in birth, so in death are all alike,--beginning with the same nakedness, and ending in the same decay; nor do worms spare the white body more than the black.
Plainly it shows how conduct and character are realities, while other things are but accidents.
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