“It means the stopping of self-respecting, law-abiding colored citizens in their efforts to secure homes and plant themselves in communities as taxpayers.
“Rental values will advance since there will be no outlet for an already congested population: they must stay where they are, and in order to do so pay any price which an unscrupulous money grabber may demand. With the high cost of foodstuffs and the low scale of wages for unskilled labor the passage of the West ordinance points to the creation of a pauper element in our city rather than a thrifty, law-abiding colored citizenship, and the pauper element of any city or community makes the more prosperous pay in one way or another for their support.
“In your ordinance you involve the bread of my people. Recently I stood in Pierce Street and overheard this conversation: A colored woman was asked, ‘Did you get the place?’ ‘Yes, I got it and started to work, when the lady asked me where I lived, and when I told her she said she could not have any one in her house who came from that street. She said there was too much disease there.’ It remained for that woman to move. With the West ordinance in force, where could she go? We have already a crowded colored population. For her to move out meant for some one else to move in. It affects not only the employed, but the employer, and the only way out is for the man who hires a servant to go to the additional expense of renting or buying a house for his servants in more healthy quarters, which will aggravate the already troublesome help problem.”
The Philadelphia Ledger adds helplessly:
“How the Negro is going to be helped to rise under these circumstances is one of the inscrutable problems of our time and generation. His own unaided efforts are blocked everywhere by caste restrictions and discriminations.”
The New York Globe says:
“The Negro has been told to smile and look pleasant as his political rights have been taken from him. The argument has been that if he did not make a fuss over voting the race prejudice of his white fellow citizen would abate—that he would be given a freer chance to work, to acquire property, to become of material weight in the community. But, North as well as South, doors of industry are being shut against the Negro. The economic tragedy of the educated Negro who aspires to good things is pitiful. He finds either that personal effort and merit do not count, or that they do not count much. In many places it is against the Negro who is not willing to stay down in the mire that antipathy blazes the most brightly. He is the ‘biggotty nigger’.”
Finally the Boston Herald pauses to remark:
“We purchased more than we knew with that first cargo of slaves sold by the Dutch captain to the Virginia planters now almost three hundred years ago.”