who might be friendly to their rights. Nor are they able to influence the
election of judges or other public officials, to whom are entrusted the
protection of their lives, their liberties and their property. No judge is
rendered careful, no sheriff diligent, for fear that he may offend a black
constituency; the contrary is most lamentably true; day after day the
catalogue of lynchings and anti-Negro riots upon every imaginable pretext,
grows longer and more appalling. The country stands face to face with the
revival of slavery; at the moment of this writing a federal grand jury in
Alabama is uncovering a system of peonage established under cover of law.

Under the Southern program it is sought to exclude colored men from every
grade of the public service; not only from the higher administrative
functions, to which few of them would in any event, for a long time
aspire, but from the lowest as well. A Negro may not be a constable or a
policeman. He is subjected by law to many degrading discriminations. He is
required to be separated from white people on railroads and street cars,
and, by custom, debarred from inns and places of public entertainment. His
equal right to a free public education is constantly threatened and is
nowhere equitably recognized. In Georgia, as has been shown by Dr. DuBois,
where the law provides for a pro rata distribution of the public school
fund between the races, and where the colored school population is 48 per
cent. of the total, the amount of the fund devoted to their schools is
only 20 per cent. In New Orleans, with an immense colored population, many
of whom are persons of means and culture, all colored public schools above
the fifth grade have been abolished.

The Negro is subjected to taxation without representation, which the
forefathers of this Republic made the basis of a bloody revolution.

Flushed with their local success, and encouraged by the timidity of the