If you attempt to use your brain I will kill you; and before I will stoop so low as to use my own physical power to earn my daily bread I will kill myself.' "This edict of the Anglo-Saxon race, issued in the days of slavery, is yet in force in a slightly modified form.
"He yet flees from physical exertion as though it were the leprosy itself, and yet, violently pushes the negro into that from which he has so precipitately fled, crying in a loud voice, 'unclean, unclean.' "If forced by circumstances to resort to manual labor, he chooses the higher forms of this, where skill is the main factor.

But he will not labor even here with the negro, but drives him out and bars the door.
"He will contribute the public funds to educate the negro and then exert every possible influence to keep the negro from earning a livelihood by means of that education.
"It is true, that in the goodness of his heart he will allow the negro community to have a negro preacher, teacher, doctor, pharmacist and jackleg lawyer, but further than this he will not go.

Practically all of the other higher forms of labor are hermetically sealed so far as the negro is concerned.
"Thus, like Tantalus of old, we are placed in streams of water up to our necks, but when we stoop down to drink thereof the waters recede; luscious fruit, tempting to the eye and pleasing to the taste, is placed above our heads, only to be wafted away by the winds of prejudice, when, like Tantalus we reach up to grasp and eat.
OUR CIVIL RIGHTS.
"An Italian, a Frenchman, a German, a Russian, a Chinaman and a Swede come, let us suppose, on a visit to our country.
"As they draw near our public parks they look up and see placards forbidding somebody to enter these places.

They pause to read the signs to see who it is that is forbidden to enter.
"Unable to understand our language, they see a negro child returning from school and they call the child to read and interpret the placard.
It reads thus: 'Negroes and dogs not allowed in here.' "The little negro child, whose father's sweaty, unrequited toil cleared the spot whereon the park now stands, loiters outside of the wicker gate in company with the dogs of the foreigners and gazes wistfully through the cracks at the children of these strangers sporting on the lawn.
"This is but a fair sample of the treatment which our race receives everywhere in the South.
"If we enter a place where a sign tells us that the public is served, we do not know whether we are to be waited upon or driven out like dogs.
"And the most shameful and hopeless feature connected with the question of our civil rights is that the Supreme Court has lent its official sanction to all such acts of discrimination.

The highest court in the land is the chief bulwark of caste prejudice in democratic America.
EDUCATION.
"The race that thinks of us and treats us as we have just indicated has absolute charge of the education of our children.
"They pay our teachers poorer salaries than they do their own; they give us fewer and inferior school buildings and they make us crawl in the dust before the very eyes of our children in order to secure the slightest concessions.
"They attempt to muzzle the mouths of negro teachers, and he who proclaims too loudly the doctrine of equality as taught by Thomas Jefferson, will soon be in search of other employment.
"Thus, they attempt to cripple our guides so that we may go forward at a feeble pace.
"Our children, early in life, learn of our maltreatment, and having confidence in the unused strength of their parents, urge us to right our wrongs.
"We listen to their fiery words and gaze in fondness on their little clinched fists.