All the laws for qualification of voters contemplate the qualification of a sufficient majority of the whites as to make the Negro a nullity in the elections, and this even in those communities where the Negroes out-number in population and wealth the whites by large majorities.
There are tax tests, property tests, educational tests, grand-father clauses and understanding and character clauses. Of course under the educational tests such requirements as a constitutional lawyer might not be able to meet could be made with the same facility that requirements which a fifteen year old boy could meet are made. The former requirements are for the educated and ignorant Negroes alike, while the latter, if occasion demands it, are for the whites of all degrees of intelligence. The intention of all the laws regulating the registration of voters is to disqualify as many Negroes as possible. No attempt is made to conceal the true intent of the laws by their authors or by those charged with the duty of their application.
There are members of the United States Senate owing their elevation to the disfranchisement laws of the Southern States who will not only acknowledge that their States are nullifying some of the acts of Congress but boast that they have done so and defy the executive department of the government to interfere.
Miss Schofield was greatly affected by the tendency of the government to ignore its solemn duty respecting the enforcement of many of the acts intended to degrade and humiliate the Negro race, because she said it could mean only the degradation and humiliation of all mankind. Vanderbilt and Rockefeller in their palaces of gold, she maintained, had no more right to protection than the humblest Negro in his little log hut. Humanity with her was a sacred thing and she believed in protecting it. She looked to the exercise of the franchise as the only means of securing this protection, and when she saw the right to it being stolen openly and the theft acknowledged and the court defied to do its worst by the guilty themselves, no wonder her confidence of the manhood in men was seriously shocked.
But she never ceased to hope nor ever lost an opportunity to fight for the rights which she demanded of the government for all men. One of the proposals to minimize the number of lynchings, original with her, is now a statute of some of the States. It makes the county in which the lynching of a person occurs liable to the members of the deceased family for his or her loss, and recovery may be had by action in the courts. Another important measure advocated strenuously by her was the reduction in the representatives in Congress from those States limiting the suffrage of its citizens.
CHAPTER XV.
National Segregation of Negro.
Miss Schofield was most solicitous concerning the future difficulties which the Negro problem would occasion when the colored race reaches that stage of development when requests as are made at the present time for certain rights become demands which can not be ignored or disposed of by trickery and hypocritical legislation. As she was in advance of her time about thirty years in valuing the importance of industrial training for the Negro, and as early as 1890 was teaching and practicing the principles of hygiene and sanitation as they are now in force by the United States government at the Army and Navy stations, in the camps and homes of its employees wherever governmental authority extends, so she saw that the Negro will not always be satisfied with whatever his white friends chose to give him. She felt and believed that enlightenment, through education, the day would come when the Negro would be controlled only by according to him every right to which he may be entitled, and had great confidence that education also would so improve the intelligence and morals of the white people that they would have too much respect for their own manhood to prostitute it by declining to grant absolute justice to the race.
Upon the enlightenment of both races she depended absolutely for the fulfillment of that divine declaration of 1776, which declared that all men are created free and equal. She relied upon it wholly for making the war between the States worth its cost in blood and treasury; and considered that her work would prove in vain if it did not prepare the Negro for the highest responsibilities of life and create within him an unconquerable desire to assume them.
She maintained that man’s highest development could be achieved only by holding out to him rewards commensurate with the industry necessary for his development. This principle in political economy she asserted, was responsible for the antagonism of plutocracy to the education of the masses.