“Who is Permanently Hurt?” by Booker T. Washington, Boston Our Day, June 1896

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) is best known for his belief in a practical, work-based education for African Americans in the decades following the end of Reconstruction.  Appointed the first  principal of Tuskegee Institute in 1881, he guided the growth of the school so that by 1890, it trained five hundred African American boys and girls each year.  Washington believed that if African Americans could improve their economic status, civil rights would follow.  In time, his accommodating approach toward white people increasingly separated him from leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois.

 The United States Supreme Court has recently handed down a decision declaring the separate coach law, or “Jim Crow” car law constitutional.  What does this mean? Simply that the separation of colored and white passengers as now practiced in certain Southern states is lawful and constitutional. 

 This separation may be good law, but it is not good common sense. The difference in the color of the skin is a matter for which nature is responsible. If the Supreme Court can say that it is lawful to compel all persons with black skins to ride in one car, and all with white skins to ride in another, why may it not say that it is lawful to put all yellow people in one car and all white people, whose skin is sun burnt, in another car. Nature has given both their color; or why cannot the courts go further and decide that all men with bald heads must ride in one car and all with red hair still in another. Nature is responsible for all these conditions.

But the colored people do not complain so much of the separation, as of the fact that the accommodations, with almost no exceptions, are not equal, still the same price is charged the colored passengers as is charged the white people.

Now the point of all this article is not to make a complaint against the white man or the “Jim Crow Car” law, but it is simply to say that such an unjust law injures the white man and inconveniences the negro.  No race can wrong another race simply because it has the power to do so, without being permanently injured in morals, and its ideas of justice. 

The negro can endure the temporary inconvenience, but the injury to the white man is permanent. It is the one who inflicts the wrong that is hurt, rather than the one on whom the wrong is inflicted. It is for the white man to save himself from the degradation that I plead. 

If a white man steals a negro’s ballot, it is the white man who is permanently injured.

Physical death comes to the negro lynched—death of the morals—death of the soul— comes to the white man who perpetrates the lynching.

Source: Reprinted in Thomas, Brook, ed. Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford Books. 1997.

Document 5.1.6