Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/263

 FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT AND RACE QUESTION 249

and theaters ; while the unwillingness of the southern whites to be served by civil servants of the colored race might reasonably be expected to disappear in time, along with the idea that public offices exist for the benefit of the office-holders, especially if a better-educated and more efficient class of negroes should arise in the meantime. The system of leasing convicts has some- times caused sentences of long, involuntary servitude to be imposed, not so much as a punishment for crime whereof the parties had been duly convicted as for the purpose of supplying the demand for able-bodied convicts ; but that wrong is already disappearing, together with the vicious penal system which occasioned it. But aside from the chain-gang and the public service, other opportunities for employment are open to the colored people of the South to an extent which Mr. Booker T. Washington regards as fairly satisfactory; while the Phila- delphia researches of Dr. DuBois have shown that the North has, at any rate, little cause to criticise the South in that respect. The denial of the right to vote, whether by brute force, by fraud, or under the forms of law, whether by armed mobs or by constitutional conventions, is a more serious matter. The Supreme Court has upheld the provisions of the new Mississippi constitution and statute requiring voters to be able to read any section of the state constitution, or understand or interpret the same when read, because they do not on their face discriminate between the races, and it was not proved in the argument that their actual administration was evil, but only that evil was pos- sible under them. 1 Of course, it by no means follows from this decision that the revolutionary section of the new Louisiana con- stitution, practically disfranchising only illiterate ex-slaves and descendants of slaves, will stand the same test. This provision not only denies the right to vote on account of race, color, and previous condition of servitude, in direct conflict with the Fifteenth Amendment, but it also makes the right of suffrage hereditary, in opposition to the basic principles of republican government. Even in Mississippi and other states adopting similar expedients, if the discrimination against the negroes in

'Williams vs. Mississippi, 170 U. S. 213.