Black People : The Negro and the Law - Knowing Is Education

HODEE

Alonewolf
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Jul 2, 2003
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https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15041/15041-h/15041-h.htm#The_Negro_and_the_Law

The Negro and the Law - Know the Past

I left the link to the first chapter
" Industrial Education for the Negro "

Written by Booker T. Washington
For those who know Marcus Garvey - some of Washington's writings were influential

CONTENTS​

I​
Booker T. Washington
7​
II​
The Talented Tenth
W.E. Burghardt DuBois
31​
III​
The Disfranchisement of the Negro
Charles W. Chesnutt
77​
IV​
The Negro and the Law
Wilford H. Smith
125​
V​
The Characteristics of the Negro People
H.T. Kealing
161​
VI​
Representative American Negroes
Paul Laurence Dunbar
187​
VII​
The Negro's Place in American Life at the Present Day
T. Thomas Fortune
211​

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

These methods of disfranchisement have stood such tests as the United States Courts, including the Supreme Court, have thus far seen fit to apply, in such cases as have been before them for adjudication.

These include a case based upon the "understanding" clause of the Mississippi Constitution, in which the Supreme Court held, in effect, that since there was no ambiguity in the language employed and the Negro was not directly named, the Court would not go behind the wording of the Constitution to find a meaning which discriminated against the colored voter; and the recent case of Jackson vs. Giles, brought by a colored citizen of Montgomery, Alabama, in which the Supreme Court confesses itself impotent to provide a remedy for what, by inference, it acknowledges may be a "great political wrong," carefully avoiding, however, to state that it is a wrong, although the vital prayer of the petition was for a decision upon this very point.

Now, what is the effect of this wholesale disfranchisement of colored men, upon their citizenship. The value of food to the human organism is not measured by the pains of an occasional surfeit, but by the effect of its entire deprivation. Whether a class of citizens should vote, even if not always wisely—what class does?—may best be determined by considering their condition when they are without the right to vote.

The colored people are left, in the States where they have been disfranchised, absolutely without representation, direct or indirect, in any law-making body, in any court of justice, in any branch of government—for the feeble remnant of voters left by law is so inconsiderable as to be without a shadow of power. Constituting one-eighth of the population of the whole country, two-fifths of the whole Southern people, and a majority in several States, they are not able, because disfranchised where most numerous, to send one representative to the Congress, which, by the decision in the Alabama case, is held by the Supreme Court to be the only body, outside of the State itself, competent to give relief from a great political wrong. By former decisions of the same tribunal, even Congress is impotent to protect their civil rights, the Fourteenth Amendment having long since, by the consent of the same Court, been in many respects as completely nullified as the Fifteenth Amendment is now sought to be. They have no direct representation in any Southern legislature, and no voice in determining the choice of white men who might be friendly to their rights.
 
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