ty do not entitle them to equal
treatment with the most vicious and worthless of the whites. At the moral
retchings and manly revolt of the victim against this unequal treatment
the South either sneers or else grows angry, because it affects to see in
them the Negro's ambition for social equality, his secret desire to leave
his class and to enter that of the whites and to marry white women. And so
down on the safety valve which free institutions provide, and regardless
of the steam pressure within, the South has planted its brutal might with
reckless and insolent disregard of consequences.

Everywhere the treatment of the Negro is the same, and everywhere the
purpose of the South is plain. What with its contract labor laws and
emigration laws and vagrancy laws and convict-lease and plantation-lease
and credit systems the South is working mightily, night and day, to reduce
the Negro laborer to wage slavery, to fix him in an industrial position
where he shall have no rights which the white employer class is bound to
respect. Negro labor toils and produces without adequate reward or
protection against the rapacity of Southern employers. What it gets as its
share bears no comparison with what the employer gets as his share. The
employer gets wealth while the Negro gets a bare subsistence. I am
speaking of course broadly, for there are many Negroes who get more than a
bare subsistence out of the products of their labor, and that in spite of
bad and unequal laws and conditions. But the great mass of Negro
agricultural labor is exploited and plundered by the white employer class,
and kept poor, because being poor they are esteemed less capable of giving
the South trouble. It is the only labor class in the South that is
deprived of the right to vote, and so is rendered powerless to influence
legislation and administration and the courts in its favor. If the poverty
of Negro labor renders it as a class less capable of giving the employer
class trouble this poverty is at the same time a crime breeder and a huge
crime breeder into the bargain.

Take this case which has just been decided favorably for the colored
laborer by the United States Supreme Court, as a fair example of what
Southern law and administration are doing to reduce the Negro to a
condition of helpless industrial slavery:

An Alabama case, involving charges of peonage in connection with the
operation of a convict labor law, now is before the Supreme Cour