In 1871 he declared in a letter to a South Carolina Negro convention that the race must insist not only upon equality in hotels and on public carriers but also in the schools.

"It is not enough," he said, "to provide separate accommodations for colored citizens even if in all respects as good as those of other persons....

The discrimination is an insult and a hindrance, and a bar, which not only destroys comfort and prevents equality, but weakens all other rights.

The right to vote will have new security when your equal right in public conveyances, hotels, and common schools, is at last established; but here you must insist for yourselves by speech, petition, and by vote." The Southern whites began to develop the "Jim Crow" theory of "separate but equal" accommodations.

Senator Hill of Georgia, for example, thought that hotels might have separate divisions for the two races, and he cited the division in the churches as proof that the Negro wanted separation.
About 1874, it was plain that the last radical Congress was nearly ready to enact social equality legislation.