28 ciime, and. whether their removal from place to place is not disorderly conduct deserving repression. The whites alone will form the courts. The whites alone will have all the authority, all the influence, all the means of causing their wishes and caprices to prevail, and of insuring impunity to their most odious acts of injustice, as in the palmy days of slavery. Without the right of suffrage granted to the negroes, and the equality of race, of which it is the indispensable symbol, I challenge you to organize a system of guarantees in the South, which will in the smallest degree protect the liberty of the blacks, their persons, their families, their testimony before the courts, their wages, or their property. Once more, civil equality cannot be separated from political equality as regards an entire race. It is necessary to choose between equality and inequality. And we know’ what inequality signifies. Let us not be satisfied with words. The black code still . remains standing in the Southern states ; and even though it should be abolished tomorrow’, it would none the less be found standing the day after, should the black race be banished to the ranks of an inferior race. The earnest efforts of the government, the surveillance of the friends of the blacks, the repression by the courts of certain exceptional abuses, nothing could insure to a race declared inferior, that respect and dignity without which it is impossible to maintain civil any more than political rights. The South, it is said, is kinder to free negroes than the North ! Yes, this was true, so leng as it had its slaves. But now that it has them no longer, it is animated with sentiments towards the free negroes which exceed in violence those which too often have had sway in the North. There have been bloody tragedies, since peace, in the heart of the cotton states. Free negroes Lave been whipped and mutilated ; and he would have been simple indeed that would have looked for any judicial redress. If the right of suffrage is refused, nothing opposes the continuance of this r6gime. The negroes, become public enemies by their emancipation, apd left in the state of disarmed
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