Fifty Years of Freedom: with matters of vital importance to both the white and colored people of the United StatesGrimké, Francis J. (Francis James)
History
Fifty Years of Freedom: with matters of vital importance to both the white and colored people of the United States
Grimké, Francis J. (Francis James)
African Americans
It also provides that, "In all executive departments within the District
of Columbia, clerks or employees shall not be required to occupy the
same office or work rooms with clerks or employees of African blood or
descent; nor shall any white clerk or employee be placed under the
orders, direction, or supervision of any person of African blood or
descent."
It also provides that, "In the railway mail service of the Post-office
Department white clerks shall not, except in cases of emergency, be
ordered to duty in the same mail car with postal clerks of African blood
or descent."
You will notice that the course which he recommends here, and which he
seeks to enforce by law, is not because the Negro is ignorant, not
because he is inefficient, not because he is ungentlemanly in his
deportment; but simply because he is a Negro, or has Negro blood in his
veins. The fact that he is in the service at all proves that he isn't
ignorant, that he isn't inefficient, for he is there as the result of
civil service examination. It makes no difference how much he knows, how
efficient he is, how gentlemanly he is, the thing that makes him
objectionable is that he is a Negro, or is of Negro descent. It doesn't
make any difference how highly cultivated he is, it becomes, in the
language of the Representative from Louisiana, "an intolerable
humiliation for a white man to be compelled, in order to earn his daily
bread, to work side by side with an objectionable people." It isn't the
condition of the people; it isn't their backwardness that discounts
them, but the fact that they are of African blood or descent.
Senator Vardaman, in his insane ravings over the nomination by President
Wilson of Adam E. Patterson, a colored man from Oklahoma, as Register of
the Treasury, speaks in the same strain. He says:
"The appointment of Patterson is a most unfortunate thing. Two races
cannot mix; it is contrary to the laws of nature. I am not acquainted
with Patterson. It is not he, personally, I am fighting; it is the
principle involved. I do not think any government office should be held
by a Negro. I think the defeat of this appointment of a Negro is of more
importance than the passage of the tariff bill and the enactment of
currency legislation. It rises like a mountain peak above all other
questions of the day. It seems that the appointment was made in view of
Patterson's campaign activities in the interest of Democracy. I do not
think much of the policy that pays party obligations at the expense of
the purity of the greatest race on the globe. I shall fight every Negro
appointment that is made."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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