New national era. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1870-1874, 1872-05-30
Civil Rights stricken Down.
Letter From George T. Downing.

u
To the Editor Of he Chronicle:
Self-respect demands of me to say that
feel that have been stabbed in the house o
my friends. The action of the Senate in per
fecting amnesty, and only offering q pre-
tense-not possible to be carried out--in re
gard to our civil rights is tantalizing us
while we are being racked under sense o
our subsection to deep injustice. feel thai
this is no fitting return for our loyalty to the
country and to the party we have so faith
fully adhered to. 1 feel also that it is very
poor food with which to feed the enthusiasm
necessary to be aroused among the coloret
people in the coming campaign. l feel thai
it is course which will be dexterously usec
against the party we would have succeed
In fact, it is question whether to-day's ac'
ton by the Senate is practically in advance
of the declarations made in Horace Greeley's
letter OF acceptance.
Yet the Senate commits itself, in what il
has done, to the position which Mr.. Sumner
has so long and so nobly defended, that Con
gress may secure to the citizens of the several
States their civil rights. 1t has said that hotel
keepers and common carriers, in the man
agement of their private funds in their bust
ness shall not prescribe people on account OF
race or color, while those having the charge
of public instruction may. But it also says
that State may subject colored man to be
tried by partial jury-as a jury from which
men are excluded on account of their colon
is-while it refuses to take cOgniZance of the
fact that States do so act in violation of the
Constitution, which expressly provides fol
trial "by an impartial jury"
If by the action of Congress we may be
secured in rights, which, perhaps for consid-
erations they would have us believe they
would secure us, certainly we may be secured
by Congress in the more material rights OF
equal public instruction and impartial juries-
the former of which is to teach the rising
generation how to respect even those other
rights which they pretend to wish to secure
to us, and the latter to award justice in the
enforcement of those rights.
1t would have been a very great relief tC
us, even in our defeat, if all our friends had
manifested as much earnestness in behalf OF
justice to loyal citizens who have been pray
ing for civil rights, as was manifested by
those who championed amnesty to rebels
who never asked for amnesty, but many OF
whom spurn it.
But amnesty has been carried through by
the aid and determination of Republicans
who fastened to put that measure into law,
while civil rights has been stricken down.
My manhood is humlliated--my pride of
American citizenship is broken. And l feel
that when the opportunity was seized in the
Senate to take up Mr.. Summers civil rights
bill in his absence, and without notice OF
warning to him, and at an unseemly hour,
and to despoil it of its most important fea-
lures, and then to pass it in that form as a
Senate bill only, and yet to make it a cover
to secure the enactment of the amnesty bill
as passed by the House, an outrage was COM
mtted not only against the colored race, who
asked for bread and received stone, but
against the great Senator, whose life of devo-
ton to justice and to public duty merits other
treatment than this.
GEORGE II. DOWNING.
WASHINGTON, d. c., May %, 1872.