uss measures for their redress. Well, if any group of Negroes in
almost any part of the South are hunting for trouble, let them get up a
public meeting for such a purpose, and give vent to the righteous
indignation against oppressions which ought to stir the blood of any man
who is not a slave, and then watch results. A flaming spirit will
presently appear in the midst of that meeting, and it will not be the
flaming spirit of liberty, but of a Southern mob on arson and murder
bent. Negro property will be burned and Negro blood will be shed, and that
without stint or mercy. The Negro's Constitutional right to assemble to
consider his wrongs is in reality too weak to resist the murderous
violence of a Southern mob. The mob burns Negroes and their property
almost everywhere in the South with absolute impunity. Nothing is done by
the authorities to punish the mob or to protect their victims. And yet
both the mob and its victims are American citizens, entitled alike on
paper to the law's protection and amenable alike to its penalties. The
white man enjoys a monopoly of the first and the Negro gets the lion's
share of the second. The colored man who has the temerity to agitate for
his rights in the South may find himself agitating speedily at the end of
a rope, unless he more speedily finds some hole in the ground to give him
the protection which Government refuses him. He would in that event be
surer of the thing which he seeks if the hole in the ground were a hole in
some grave yard, for then the hole might be pulled in after him, when he
would find rest at last--surcease from all the cruel perplexities and
inequalities of his American citizenship.

Again I ask why is all this thus? It is not because the Negro is an alien
or because he is an undesirable citizen. For he is not that at all, as we
have seen, but quite the contrary. But how explain this enormous
contradiction between the rights which he is legally entitled to and those
which he actually possesses? Here he is fifty years after emancipation,
forty-four years after his investiture with American citizenship, and
forty-two years after the adoption of the great Amendment to the
Constitution which gave him the right to vote, a voice in making the laws,
not more than half free, than half a citizen in many States of the Union.
Why is this so, I ask again? Is it not because he is the ballotless victim
in those states of one-party governments in which he is denied a voice?