Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O
General
Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O
Speeches, addresses, etc.
In the North, one negro in every 185 is in jail--in the South only one
in 446. In the North the percentage of negro prisoners is six times as
great as that of native whites, in the South, only four times as great.
If prejudice wrongs him in Southern courts, the record shows it to be
deeper in Northern courts. I assert here, and a bar as intelligent and
upright as the bar of Massachusetts will solemnly indorse my assertion,
that in the Southern courts, from highest to lowest, pleading for life,
liberty or property, the negro has distinct advantage because he is a
negro, apt to be over-reached, oppressed--and that this advantage
reaches from the juror in making his verdict to the judge in measuring
his sentence.
Now, Mr. President, can it be seriously maintained that we are
terrorizing the people from whose willing hands comes every year
$1,000,000,000 of farm crops? Or have robbed a people who, twenty-five
years from unrewarded slavery, have amassed in one State $20,000,000 of
property? Or that we intend to oppress the people we are arming every
day? Or deceive them, when we are educating them to the utmost limit of
our ability? Or outlaw them when we work side by side with them? Or
re-enslave them under legal forms, when for their benefit we have even
imprudently narrowed the limit of felonies and mitigated the severity of
law? My fellow-countrymen, as you yourselves may sometimes have to
appeal at the bar of human judgment for justice and for right, give to
my people to-night the fair and unanswerable conclusion of these
incontestable facts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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