But it was a bootless strife for colored people. The government which had
made the Negro a citizen found itself unable to protect him. It gave him
the right to vote, but denied him the protection which should have
maintained that right. Scourged from his home; hunted through the swamps;
hung by midnight raiders, and openly murdered in the light of day, the
Negro clung to his right of franchise with a heroism which would have
wrung admiration from the hearts of savages. He believed that in that
small white ballot there was a subtle something which stood for manhood as
well as citizenship, and thousands of brave black men went to their
graves, exemplifying the one by dying for the other.

The white man's victory soon became complete by fraud, violence,
intimidation and murder. The franchise vouchsafed to the Negro grew to be
a "barren ideality," and regardless of numbers, the colored people found
themselves voiceless in the councils of those whose duty it was to rule.
With no longer the fear of "Negro Domination" before their eyes, the
white man's second excuse became valueless. With the Southern governments
all subverted and the Negro actually eliminated from all participation in
state and national elections, there could be no longer an excuse for
killing Negroes to prevent "Negro Domination."

Brutality still continued; Negroes were whipped, scourged, exiled, shot
and hung whenever and wherever it pleased the white man so to treat them,
and as the civilized world with increasing persistency held the white
people of the South to account for its outlawry, the murderers invented
the third excuse--that Negroes had to be killed to avenge their assaults
upon women. There could be framed no possible excuse more harmful to the
Negro and more unanswerable if true in its sufficiency for the white man.