The mob which lynches a negro charged with rape will in a little while lynch a white man suspected of crime.

The lesson is this: No good citizen can afford to countenance a defiance of the statutes, no matter what the provocation.

The innocent frequently suffer, and, it is my observation, more usually suffer than the guilty.

The white people of the South indict the whole colored race on the ground that even the better elements lend no assistance whatever in ferreting out criminals of their own color.

The respectable colored people must learn not to harbor their criminals, but to assist the officers in bringing them to justice.

The two races can never get on until there is an understanding on the part of both to make common cause with the law-abiding against criminals of any color.

Moreover, where any crime committed by a member of one race against a member of another race is avenged in such fashion that it seems as if not the individual criminal, but the whole race, is attacked, the result is to exasperate to the…

There is but one safe rule in dealing with black men as with white men; it is the same rule that must be applied in dealing with rich men and poor men; that is, to treat each man, whatever his color, his creed, or his social position, with…

Reward or punish the individual on his merits as an individual.

Evil will surely come in the end to both races if we substitute for this just rule the habit of treating all the members of the race, good and bad, alike.

The members of the white race on the other hand should understand that every lynching represents by just so much a loosening of the bands of civilization; that the spirit of lynching inevitably throws into prominence in the community all…

No man can take part in the torture of a human being without having his own moral nature permanently lowered.

Every lynching means just so much moral deterioration in all the children who have any knowledge of it, and therefore just so much additional trouble for the next generation of Americans.

Let justice be both sure and swift; but let it be justice under the law, and not the wild and crooked savagery of a mob.

It is out of the question for our people as a whole permanently to rise by treading down any of their own number.

Even those who themselves for the moment profit by such maltreatment of their fellows will in the long run also suffer.

No more shortsighted policy can be imagined than, in the fancied interest of one class, to prevent the education of another class.

The free public school, the chance for each boy or girl to get a good elementary education, lies at the foundation of our whole political situation.

In every community the poorest citizens, those who need the schools most, would be deprived of them if they only received school facilities proportioned to the taxes they paid.

Unquestionably education such as is obtained in our public schools does not do everything towards making a man a good citizen; but it does much.

The graduates of these schools turn out well in the great majority of cases, and hardly any of them become criminals, while what little criminality there is never takes the form of that brutal violence which invites lynch law.

Great though the benefit of these schools has been to their colored pupils and to the colored people, it may well be questioned whether the benefit, has not been at least as great to the white people among whom these colored pupils live…

Swift, relentless, and orderly punishment under the law is the only way by which criminality of this type can permanently be supprest.

In dealing with both labor and capital, with the questions affecting both corporations and trades unions, there is one matter more important to remember than aught else, and that is the infinite harm done by preachers of mere discontent.

These are the men who seek to excite a violent class hatred against all men of wealth.