Memphis, Tennessee. Mid-August 1884.
Ida B. Wells’ heart races upon seeing on the envelope a familiar handwriting. It’s a letter from the great Frederick Douglass with whom she has been corresponding regarding an unpleasant incident she experienced on a Chesapeake & Ohio train. On May 4, after she refused to give up her seat in the first-class lady’s car, the train conductor and two men dragged her to the crowded smoking car which also served as segregated car for colored people.
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| Ida B. Wells circa 1893 |
Ida is surprised that the esteemed orator and abolitionist leader finds the time to respond to all her inquiries, despite his arduous travelling schedule on lecture tours. Since escaping from slavery in 1838 when he was twenty, he’s become the most well-known abolitionist in America and abroad. However, he has lately come under attack for continuing to back the Republican Party despite their increasingly pro-rich position throughout the Great Railroad Strike and the dirty Compromise of 1877 which, among other things, pulled federal troops out of the South.
But given the Democrat Party’s white-supremacist policies and practices, his support for the Republican Party is welcomed by seven millions of blacks in Southern states where Jim Crow laws renewed their status as oppressed second-class citizens terrorized into fearful silence from lynching, murders, arson and threats by white supremacists even after the Klu Klux Klan was suppressed in 1871. Ultimately, the dirty politics of the day hurt both blacks and poor whites. The same federal troops that had protected blacks from violence were pulled out and sent to suppress the Great Strike of 1877 a few months later.
With slightly trembling hands, Ida opens the envelope and finds a letter and a booklet. The letter reads …
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Battle Creek, Michigan.
Aug 1, 1884
Dear Miss Wells,
Thank you for your latest letter of July 5th which I received with gratitude. It was very kind of you to remind me with appreciation of my speech What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? from many years ago. While recounting it, I was struck by how much and how little things have changed during the two decades after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War.
Later today, I will humbly be giving another speech here in Battle Creek to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation in the British West Indies. As you are aware, the abolition movement in America, like many other institutions of this country, was largely derived from England. Even the doctrine of immediate emancipation as against gradualism, is of English, not American origin. It was expounded and enforced by Elizabeth Heyrick and adopted by all the earnest abolitionists in England.
I happily remember my first lecture tour in the British Isles in 1845-7, occasioned by the threats made against my life after the publication of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. During the tour, I had the opportunity to visit Ireland at the outbreak of the Great Famine which ultimately killed a million and sent another million starving Irish men, women and children to our shore.
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| Great Irish Famine 1845-9 |
Exchanges with Irish leader "The Liberator" Daniel O'Connell opened my eyes to see that poverty and inequality are not natural states, but conditions inflicted by one group of man on another. Such was clearly shown by how the Corn Law and aristocratic landlord turned a natural blight into a catastrophic famine. It is no surprise that they are now reaping the consequences with the Land War, which may erupt into a civil war someday.
For wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved. When we wanted, a few years ago, a slice of Mexico, it was hinted that the Mexicans were an inferior race, that the old Castilian blood had become so weak that it would scarcely run down hill, and that Mexico needed the long, strong and beneficent arm of the Anglo-Saxon care extended over it. We said that it was necessary to its salvation, and a part of the "manifest destiny" of this Republic, to extend our arm over that dilapidated government. So, too, when Russia wanted to take possession of a part of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks were an "inferior race." So, too, when England wants to set the heel of her power more firmly in the quivering heart of old Ireland, the Celts are an "inferior race." So, too, the Negro, when he is to be robbed of any right which is justly his, is an "inferior man."
This is the reason why I oppose our wars of expansions such as the Mexican War, through which those deluded in America’s manifest destiny wish to enlarge slavery territory like the imperialist William Walker who would have us annex Cuba and much of Central America.
Neither do I support, as President Lincoln did, sending freed blacks “back” to Africa – a continent they have never seen. Lincoln fought to save the Union at all costs, not – at least not at first – to emancipate enslaved people. Laying blame for the secession on enslaved people, he would have removed all black presence from American soil to prevent further conflict. To him, I insisted that black people should rightfully remain in this land where we and our ancestors have toiled with blood, even if white people are unwilling to accept our equality or doubt our ability to ever achieve it.
Having said that, although Lincoln shared the prejudices of his white fellow countrymen against blacks, it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery which he said was ‘the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.’
Another thing that I came to realize while in Ireland was the intersections of the Irish struggle against British rule with our own. Because of the global reach of British and French power, I can’t help wondering whether Lincoln was finally pushed to issue the Emancipation Proclamation – after the chastisements from abolitionists including myself proved ineffective – in order to prevent Britain and France from recognizing, or, worse, arming the Confederacy? Whatever the reason, his Emancipation Proclamation as well as his agreement to enlist black soldiers to fight shoulder to shoulder with their white comrades did much to regain my respect for him.
Going back even further, it was also in England that it was suggested to me that our Revolutionary War was in fact a counter-revolution against abolition. According to this particular English gentleman, Lord Mansfield’s decision of 1772 frightened the Southern colonies so much that they joined the North in taking up arms in order to shield the institution of slavery from the impending emancipation. It is not unlike when later Napoleon sent troops to suppress rebelling Haitians from enjoying the same Rights of Man as Frenchmen. However, I didn’t believe it then as I still don’t believe it now.
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| Haitian Revolution |
After all, I have faith that our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution contain Enlightenment ideals that extend equality and rights to black Americans. Regrettably that was how I came to a long disagreement with my former mentor Mr. Garrison who burned the constitution which he believed to be absolutely pro-slavery.
But after the Supreme Court decision last year declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, I wonder if he was right. How is it justice when it’s decided that the Fourteenth Amendment protect blacks only from discrimination by states but not by individuals and corporations? At this rate, these corporations will one day have more rights than people of color like us, as, according to the newspapers, railroad barons are now arguing in court that their companies are protected by the amendment ‘persons’!
The strength and activities of the malign elements of the country against equal rights and equality before the law seem to increase in proportion to the increasing distance between that time and the time of the war. When the black man's arm was needed to defend the country; when the North and the South were in arms against each other and the country was in danger of dismemberment, his rights were well considered.
That the reverse is now true, is a proof of the fading and defacing effect of time and the transient character of Republican gratitude. From the hour that the loyal North began to fraternize with the disloyal and slaveholding South; from the hour that they began to "shake hands over the bloody chasm", from that hour the cause of justice to the black man began to decline and lose its hold upon the public mind, and it has lost ground ever since.
The future historian will turn to the year 1883 to find the most flagrant example of this national deterioration. Here he will find the Supreme Court of the nation reversing the action of the Government, defeating the manifest purpose of the Constitution, nullifying the Fourteenth Amendment, and placing itself on the side of prejudice, proscription, and persecution.
Whatever this Supreme Court may have been in the past, or may by the Constitution have been intended to be, it has, since the days of the Dred Scott decision, been wholly under the influence of the slave power, and its decisions have been dictated by that power rather than by what seemed to be sound and established rules of legal interpretation.
Although we had, in other days, seen this court bend and twist the law to the will and interest of the slave power, it was supposed that by the late war and the great fact that slavery was abolished, and the further fact that the members of the bench were now appointed by a Republican administration, the spirit as well as the body had been exorcised. Hence the decision in question came to the black man as a painful and bewildering surprise. It was a blow from an unsuspected quarter.
For the moment the colored citizen felt as if the earth was opened beneath him. He was wounded in the house of his friends. He felt that this decision drove him from the doors of the great temple of American justice. The nation that he had served against its enemies had thus turned him over naked to those enemies. His trouble was without any immediate remedy. The decision must stand until the gates of death could prevail against it.
As of now, I’m increasingly negative about taking up further government positions, but at the same time I’m greatly encouraged that you are pursuing a lawsuit against the train company. This case is very important for all black people, and it must be doubly so for you as a lady. The Supreme Court decision took away protection against discrimination from not only blacks but also women. I am confident that suffragists like Elizabeth Stanton, my long-time friends since the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention and Susan B. Anthony will agree with my opinion regarding the decision. (Although we may have parted our ways over the Fifteenth Amendment, I wish her all the best in her renewed struggle for women’s suffrage since appearing before the House Judiciary Committee a few months ago.)
I hereby enclose a copy of the Proceedings of the Human Rights Mass Meeting of October 22, 1883 – one week after the decision – which also contains my full speech on the Supreme Court decision. I hope you will find useful the arguments therein. I look forward to hearing from you on the lawsuit.
With kind regards,
Frederick Douglass
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| Frederick Douglass after 1884 with his second wife Helen Pitts Douglass (sitting). The woman standing is her sister Eva Pitts. |
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The "This decision has humbled the nation" speech of October 22, 1883 speech reads:
Friends and fellow citizens. I have only a few words to say to you this evening....
We have been, as a class, grievously wounded, wounded in the house of our friends, and this wound is too deep and too painful for ordinary and measured speech…
The cause which has brought us here tonight is neither common nor trivial. Few events in our national history have surpassed it in magnitude, importance and significance. It has swept over the land like a cyclone, leaving moral desolation in its track. This decision belongs with a class of judicial and legislative wrongs by which we have been oppressed.
We feel it as we felt years ago the furious attempt to force the accursed system of slavery upon the soil of Kansas; as we felt the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Bill, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the Dred Scott decision. I look upon it as one more shocking development of that moral weakness in high places which has attended the conflict between the spirit of liberty and the spirit of slavery, and I venture to predict that it will be so regarded by aftercoming generations. Far down the ages, when men shall wish to inform themselves as to the real state of liberty, law, religion, and civilization in the United States at this juncture of our history, they will overhaul the proceedings of the Supreme Court, and read this strange decision declaring the Civil Rights Bill unconstitutional and void…
We cannot, however, overlook the fact that though not so intended, this decision has inflicted a heavy calamity upon seven millions of the people of this country, and left them naked and defenseless against the action of a malignant, vulgar and pitiless prejudice from which the Constitution plainly intended to shield them.
It presents the United States before the world as nation utterly destitute of power to protect the constitutional rights of its own citizens upon its own soil. It can claim service and allegiance, loyalty and life from them, but it cannot protect them against the most palpable violation of the rights of human nature; rights to secure which governments are established. It can tax their bread and tax their blood, but it has no protecting power for their persons. Its national power extends only to the District of Columbia and the Territories—to where the people have no votes, and to where the land has no people. All else is subject to the States. In the name of common sense, I ask what right have we to call ourselves a nation, in view of this decision and of this utter destitution of power?
In humiliating the colored people of this country, this decision has humbled the nation. It gives to the railroad conductor in South Carolina or Mississippi more power than it gives to the National Government. He may order the wife of the Chief Justice of the United States into a smoking-car full of hirsute men and compel her to go and to listen to the coarse jests and inhale the foul smoke of a vulgar crowd. It gives to hotel keepers who may, from a prejudice born of the Rebellion, wish to turn her out at midnight into the storm and darkness, power to compel her to go.
In such a case, according to this decision of the Supreme Court, the National Government has no right to interfere. She must take her claim for protection and redress, not to the nation, but to the State; and when the State, as I understand it, declares that there is upon its statute-book no law for her protection, and that the State has made no law against her, the function and power of the National Government are exhausted and she is utterly without any redress.
Bad, therefore, as our case is, under this decision, the evil principle affirmed by the court is not wholly confined to or spent upon persons of color. The wife of Chief-Justice Waite—I speak it respectfully—is protected to-day, not by the law, but solely by the accident of her color. So far as the law of the land is concerned, she is in the same condition as that of the humblest colored woman in the Republic. The difference between colored and white here is that the one, by reason of color, does not need protection. It is nevertheless true that manhood is insulted in both cases.
"No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow-man, without at last finding the other end of it about his own neck."
The lesson of all the ages upon this point is, that a wrong done to one man is a wrong done to all men. It may not be felt at the moment, and the evil may be long delayed, but so sure as there is a moral government of the universe, so sure as there is a God of the universe, so sure will the harvest of evil come. Color prejudice is not the only prejudice against which a Republic like ours should guard. The spirit of caste is malignant and dangerous everywhere. There is the prejudice of the rich against the poor, the pride and prejudice of the idle dandy against the hard-handed workingman. There is, worst of all, religious prejudice, a prejudice which has stained whole continents with blood. It is, in fact, a spirit infernal, against which every enlightened man should wage perpetual war.
Perhaps no class of our fellow-citizens has carried this prejudice against color to a point more extreme and dangerous than have our Catholic Irish fellow citizens, and yet no people on the face of the earth have been more relentlessly persecuted and oppressed on account of race and religion than have this same Irish people. But in Ireland persecution has at last reached a point where it reacts terribly upon her persecutors. England is to-day reaping the bitter consequences of her own injustice and oppression. Ask any man of intelligence, "What is the chief source of England's weakness? What has reduced her to the rank of a second-class power?" and if truly answered, the answer will be "Ireland!" But poor, ragged, hungry, starving, and oppressed as Ireland is, she is strong enough to be a standing menace to the power and glory of England.
Fellow citizens! We want no black Ireland in America. We want no aggrieved class in America. Strong as we are without the negro, we are stronger with him than without him. The power and friendship of seven millions of people, however humble and scattered all over the country, are not to be despised.
Today our Republic sits as a queen among the nations of the earth. Peace is within her walls and plenteousness within her palaces, but he is bolder and a far more hopeful man than I am who will affirm that this peace and prosperity will always last. History repeats itself. What has happened once may happen again.
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| Crispus Attucks, the first American martyr to die for the American Revolutionary War |
The negro, in the Revolution, fought for us and with us. In the war of 1812 General Jackson, at New Orleans, found it necessary to call upon the colored people to assist in its defense against England. Abraham Lincoln found it necessary to call upon the negro to defend the Union against rebellion. In all cases the negro responded gallantly. Our legislators, our Presidents, and our judges should have a care, lest, by forcing these people outside of law, they destroy that love of country which in the day of trouble is needful to the nation's defense.
Fellow citizens! While slavery was the base line of American society, while it ruled the church and state; while it was the interpreter of our law and the exponent of our religion, it admitted no quibbling, no narrow rules of legal or scriptural interpretations of the Bible or of the Constitution. It sternly demanded its pound of flesh, no matter how the scale turned or how much blood was shed in the taking of it. It was enough for it to be able to show the intention to get all it asked in the courts or out of the courts. But now slavery is abolished. Its reign was long, dark and bloody. Liberty is now the base line of the Republic. Liberty has supplanted slavery, but I fear it has not supplanted the spirit or power of slavery. Where slavery was strong, liberty is now weak.
Oh, for a Supreme Court of the United States which shall be as true to the claims of humanity as the Supreme Court formerly was to the demands of slavery! When that day comes, as come it will, a Civil Rights Bill will not be declared unconstitutional and void, in utter and flagrant disregard of the objects and intentions of the national legislature by which it was enacted and of the rights plainly secured by the Constitution. This decision of the Supreme Court admits that the Fourteenth Amendment is a prohibition on the States. It admits that a State shall not abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, but commits the seeming absurdity of allowing the people of a State to do what it prohibits the State itself from doing.
It used to be thought that the whole was more than a part; that the greater included the less, and that what was unconstitutional for a State to do was equally unconstitutional for an individual member of a State to do. What is a State, in the absence of the people who compose it? Land, air and water. That is all. Land and water do not discriminate. All are equal before them. This law was made for people. As individuals, the people of the State of South Carolina may stamp out the rights of the negro wherever they please, so long as they do not do so as a State, and this absurd conclusion is to be called a law. All the parts can violate the Constitution, but the whole cannot. It is not the act itself, according to this decision, that is unconstitutional. The unconstitutionality of the case depends wholly upon the party committing the act. If the State commits it, the act is wrong; if the citizen of the State commits it, the act is right.
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| By the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men (10% of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war. |
O consistency, thou. art indeed a jewel! What does it matter to a colored citizen that a State may not insult and outrage him, if the citizen of the State may? The effect upon him is the same, and it was just this effect that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment plainly intended by that article to prevent.
It was the act, not the instrument; it was the murder, not the pistol or dagger, which was prohibited. It meant to protect the newly enfranchised citizen from injustice and wrong, not merely from a State, but from the individual members of a State. It meant to give the protection to which his citizenship, his loyalty, his allegiance, and his services entitled him; and this meaning and this purpose and this intention are now declared by the Supreme Court of the United States to be unconstitutional and void.
I say again, fellow citizens, Oh, for a Supreme Court which shall be as true, as vigilant, as active and exacting in maintaining laws enacted for the protection of human rights, as in other days was that court for the destruction of human rights!
It is said that this decision will make no difference in the treatment of colored people; that the Civil Rights Bill was a dead letter and could not be enforced. There may be some truth in all this, but it is not the whole truth. That bill, like all advance legislation, was a banner on the outer wall of American liberty; a noble moral standard uplifted for the education of the American people…
This law, though dead, did speak. It expressed the sentiment of justice and fair play common to every honest heart. Its voice was against popular prejudice and meanness. It appealed to all the noble and patriotic instincts of the American people. It told the American people that they were all equal before the law; that they belonged to a common country and were equal citizens.
The Supreme Court has hauled down this broad and glorious flag of liberty in open day and before all the people, and has thereby given joy to the heart of every man in the land who wishes to deny to others the rights he claims for himself. It is a concession to race pride, selfishness, and meanness, and will be received with joy by every upholder of caste in the land, and for this I deplore and denounce this decision…
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Thank you.
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