IV. At the end of these fifty years of freedom, in spite of the remarkable progress that we have made along all lines, we find race prejudice increasing instead of diminishing. The remarkable record of progress that we have made has had no appreciable influence, so far as appears on the surface, in lessening the feeling of hostility to us. Race prejudice is stronger, is more bitter, more aggressive to-day than ever before. The enemies of the race are more united and more determined than ever to throw themselves across the pathway of our progress and to compel us by sheer brute force, whatever our attainments may be, into a position of permanent inferiority. Not content with what has already been done to humiliate us, it is now demanding segregation, is now insisting upon restricting the rights of colored people to live in certain prescribed sections of communities only. And it has become so emboldened, so insolently aggressive that it is demanding segregation among the employees of the General Government itself. And its demand is being acceded to. Segregation, as a matter of fact, has already begun in some of the Departments of the Government. A bill recently introduced into Congress makes it a criminal offense to mix the races—to have white and colored clerks working together in the same room. For nearly a half century white and colored clerks have worked side by side, and nothing was thought of it; but now through this insane desire to humiliate a race, to impress it more and more with its inferiority, it is now proposed to make it a crime, not under laws enacted by Negro-hating Southern legislatures, but by the National Government itself, which is supposed to represent all the people, and to represent equality of rights for all the people. That prejudice is increasing; that more and more the effort is being made, and in ever-widening areas, to hedge us about with limitations, with restrictions which are not imposed upon other elements of the population, is manifest to any one whose eyes are open to what is going on in the country, not in one section only, but in all sections. V. At the end of these fifty years, we find nearly all the rights guaranteed to us under the constitution, especially under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, practically nullified in a large section of the country. In the South we have been disfranchised. We have no rights, civil or political, which the white man is bound to respect. The only good Negro in the estimation of the dominant sentiment of the South to-day after fifty years of freedom, is the Negro who knows his place, and who is willing to keep his place of subjection, of subordination to the white man.