k the
honorable gentleman from Kentucky or the honorable gentleman from
Georgia--is it pretended anywhere that the evils of which we complain,
our exclusion from the public inn, from the saloon and table of the
steamboat, from the sleeping-coach on the railway, from the right of
sepulture in the public burial-ground, are an exercise of the police
power of the State? Is such oppression and injustice nothing but the
exercise by the State of the right to make regulations for the health,
comfort, and security of all her citizens? Is it merely enacting that
one man shall so use his own as not to injure anothers? Is the colored
race to be assimilated to an unwholesome trade or to combustible
materials, to be interdicted, to be shut up within prescribed limits?
Let the gentleman from Kentucky or the gentleman from Georgia answer.
Let the country know to what extent even the audacious prejudice of the
gentleman from Kentucky will drive him, and how far even the gentleman
from Georgia will permit himself to be led captive by the unrighteous
teachings of a false political faith.

If we are to be likened in legal view to "unwholesome trades," to "large
and offensive collections of animals" to "noxious slaughter-houses," to
"the offal and stench which attend on certain manufactures" let it be
avowed. If that is still the doctrine of the political party, to which
the gentlemen belong, let it be put upon record. If State laws which
deny us the common rights and privileges of other citizens, upon no
possible or conceivable ground save one of prejudice, or of "taste" as
the gentleman from Texas termed it, and as I suppose the gentlemen will
prefer to call it, are to be placed under the protection of a decision
which affirms the right of a State to regulate the police power of her
great cities, then the decision is in conflict with the bill before us.
No man will dare maintain such a doctrine. It is as shocking to the
legal mind as it is offensive to the heart and conscience of all who
love justice or respect manhood. I am astonished that the gentleman from
Kentucky or the gentleman from Georgia should have been so grossly
misled as to rise here and assert that the decision of the Supreme Court
in these cases was a denial to Congress of the power to legislate
against discriminations on account of race, color, or previous
conditions of servitude because that Court has decided that exclusive
privileges conferred for the common protection