Mr. Edwin D. Mead, in the New York Independent of January 21, 1909, says, "Has the country been faithful to Lincoln's memory and task? Has the evolution of emancipation been pushed with proper persistence and earnestness? Are we ceasing our discrimination against men because they are black? It is not a question put by North to South. It is a question put to Springfield, Illinois, the old home of Lincoln himself, as directly as to men in Maryland busy with their pitiful disfranchising chicanery." To the still lingering cry of "black men down" this salutary Commemoration rings back, the "all men up," whose echoes after forty years were growing faint in too many American hearts.
Had they not grown faint in many, the recent words of Justice Harlan, so like Lincoln's own, upon the Berea College decision confirming the Kentucky law that, however, they themselves desired it, and even in private institutions, a black boy and a white boy may not study together the rule of three or the law of gravitation, the Golden Rule, or the Emancipation Proclamation,—would have aroused a vastly profounder and louder response.
"If the views of the highest court of Kentucky be sound, that commonwealth may, without infringing on the Constitution of the United States, forbid the association in the same private school of pupils of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races respectively, or pupils of Christian and Jewish faith respectively. Have we become so inoculated with prejudice of race that any American government professedly based on the principles of freedom and charged with the protection of all citizens alike can make distinctions between such citizens in the manner of their voluntary meeting for innocent purposes, simply because of their respective races? If the court be right, then the State may make it a crime for white and colored persons to frequent the same market-places at the same time or to appear in an assemblage of citizens convened to consider questions of a public or political nature, in which all citizens without regard to race are equally interested; and other illustrations would show the mischievous, not to say cruel, character of the statute in question, and how inconsistent such legislation is with the principle of the equality of citizens before the law."
Mr. Mead further says that Abraham Lincoln was called upon to make his memorable and mighty protest with reference to a single race. In our time the problem becomes vastly more complex and pressing.
But, however complex, there is but one way of solving it—the simple, Christian, fraternal way. It is well for us that the Lincoln centennial comes to say this to us persuasively and commandingly.
ADDRESS ON THE OCCASION OF THE PRESENTATION OF A LOVING CUP TO HON. JOSEPH BENSON FORAKER, UNITED STATES SENATOR[39]
By Hon. Archibald H. Grimke
The Honorable Joseph Benson Foraker, and Colored Citizens:
A little more than two years ago the country was startled one November morning by a Presidential order for which there is no precedent in the history of the government. It was an act not only without precedent, but, as it appeared at the time to many Americans and as it appears to them now for that matter, not warranted either by law or justice. The punishment which that order inflicted on a whole battalion of American soldiers, without trial of any kind seemed unmerited and cruel in the highest degree, and a wanton abuse of executive power.
The history of this case is known of all men, thanks and yet again thanks and love without limit to the illustrious man whom we have met to honor to-night. For it is now and it must forever remain the history of the Black Battalion and of Senator Foraker. It is the history of the most masterly and heroic struggle in defense of the rights and liberties of the individual citizen against executive usurpation and oppression which this country has witnessed for a generation.