ong time he
was protected, politically, by force of federal arms and the most
rigid federal laws, and still more effectively, perhaps, by the voice
and influence in the halls of legislation of such advocates of the
rights of the Negro race as Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, Benjamin
F. Butler, James M. Ashley, Oliver P. Morton, Carl Schurz, and Roscoe
Conkling, and on the stump and through the public press by those great
and powerful Negroes, Frederick Douglass, John M. Langston, Blanche K.
Bruce, John R. Lynch, P. B. S. Pinchback, Robert Browne Elliot, T.
Thomas Fortune, and many others; but the Negro has continued for
twenty years to have fewer representatives in the State and national
legislatures. The reduction has continued until now it is at the point
where, with few exceptions, he is without representatives in the
law-making bodies of the State and of the nation.

Now let us find, if we can, a cause for this. The Negro is fond of
saying that his present condition is due to the fact that the State
and federal courts have not sustained the laws passed for the
protection of the rights of his people; but I think we shall have to
go deeper than this, because I believe that all agree that court
decisions, as a rule, represent the public opinion of the community or
nation creating and sustaining the court.

At the beginning of his freedom it was unfortunate that those of the
white race who won the political confidence of the Negro were not,
with few exceptions, men of such high character as would lead them to
assist him in laying a firm foundation for his development. Their
main purpose appears to have been, for selfish ends in too many
instances, merely to control his vote. The history of the
reconstruction era will show that this was unfortunate for all the
parties in interest.

It would have been better, from any point of view, if the native
Southern white man had taken the Negro, at the beginning of his
freedom, into his political confidence, and exercised an influence and
control over him before his political affections were alienated.

The average Southern white man has an idea to-day that, if the Negro
were permitted to get any political power, all the mistakes of the
reconstruction period would be repeated. He forgets or ignores the
fact that thirty years of acquiring education and property and
character have produced a higher type of black man than existed thirty
years ago.

But, to be more specific, f