“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.

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Excerpts from “The Courts and the Negro,” a speech by Charles Chesnutt, 1911

Charles Chesnutt (1858–1932) was the best known African American fiction writing or his time.  Born in Cleveland, Ohio, to parents who were free blacks before the Civil War, he lived in North Carolina and witnessed first hand Reconstruction and its end.  He returned to Cleveland in 1884, studied law, passed the bar exam, and began working as a legal stenographer.  He had already begun writing, and in time had three novels published, many short stories, and a biography of Frederick Douglass.  Chesnutt gave this speech after he abandoned his literary career.  In the speech, he draws on his legal background to give a concise history of how Supreme Court rulings have affected African Americans.

[T]o my mind the most important and far reaching decision of the Supreme Court upon the question of civil rights is that in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, a case which came up from Louisiana in 1895. (163 U.S., 537.)  The opinion is a clear and a definite approval of the recognition by State laws, of color distinctions, something which had theretofore been avoided in civil rights cases.  It establishes racial caste in the United States as firmly as though it were established by act of Congress.  To the opinion Mr. Justice Harlan dissented with his usual vigor, and Justice Brewer did not hear the argument or participate in the decision.  The Court cited the passage quoted by me from a former decision:

The Fourteenth Amendment was ordained to secure equal rights to all persons, and extends its protection to races and classes, and prohibits any State legislation which has the effect of denying to any race or class, or to any individual, the equal protection of the laws, and made the rights of the two races exactly the same.

And then the Court stabbed in the back, and to death, this ideal presentment of rights, and threw its bleeding corpse to the Negro,—the comprehensive Negro, black, brown, yellow, and white—the plaintiff in that case, which involved the separate car law in Louisiana, was seven-eighths white and showed no sign of darker blood—as that court’s definition of his civil status:…

When it was suggested in the argument that to sustain such discrimination laws might justify separate cars for people with red hair or aliens, or require people to walk on different sides of the street, or require colored men’s houses to be in separate blocks, the Court in the opinion, said that such regulations must be reasonable.  And the Court held:

In determining the question of reasonableness, it is at liberty to act with reference to the usages, customs, and traditions of the people, with a view to the promotion of their comfort and the preservation of the public peace and good order.

It is obvious where this leaves the Negro, and it is difficult to see where the Fourteenth Amendment has any application.

The opinion in Plessy vs. Ferguson is, in my mind, as epoch-making as the Dred Scott decision.  Unfortunately, it applies to a class of rights which do not make the heart and conscience of the nation the same direct appeal as was made by slavery, and has not been nor is it likely to produce any such revulsion of feeling.

Another extract from the opinion makes one wonder whether the Court was merely playing with the subject:

We consider the underlying failure of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the races stamps the colored race with the badge of inferiority.  If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act itself, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

I presume that hanging might be pleasant if a man could only convince himself that it would not be painful, nor disgraceful, nor terminate his earthly career.  It is perhaps true that some Negroes—I suspect very few people of mixed blood—have seemed to accept this reasoning.  But I have never been able to see how a self-respecting colored man can approve of any discriminating legislation.

To do so is to condone his own degradation, and accept an inferior citizenship.  If discrimination must of necessity be submitted to, it should meet no better reception than silence.  Protest were better still.

I need not suggest the far-reaching effect of this decision.  The colored people of the South have been, it would seem, as completely segregated as the business of daily life will permit.  Perhaps the lowest depths of race hatred have not been sounded, but a more humiliating, insulting, and degrading system is hardly conceivable under even a nominally free government.  Under Plessy v. Ferguson there is no reason why any northern State may not reproduce in its own borders the conditions in Alabama and Georgia.  And it may be that the Negro and his friends will have to exert themselves to save his rights at the North….

Source: Original copies of the speech are at The Charles W. Chesnutt collection at the Fisk University library.  Published in Thomas, Brook. ed. Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.

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