Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/177

Rh The civil rights of the Negro found nowhere a more ardent champion than James T. Rapier, a representative from Alabama in the Forty-third Congress. In a speech on the measure supplementary to the civil rights bill, Rapier made a lucid analysis of the anomalous position then occupied by the Negro in the United States. Pointing out that Negroes were accorded political rights without the civil, he deplored the whole situation and challenged the truth of the statement that America is the asylum for the oppressed. Averring that the problem was national in scope, he asserted the constitutional authority of Congress to solve it. Denying the contentions of Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, Rapier deplored the apparent inability of that gentleman to comprehend the new order ushered in since the formerly sat in Congress. Stephens, he said, maintained the ideals of the old South. Thus, despite the decision of the war that national rights are paramount to those of the States, Stephens urged that it is the prerogative of the States to confer civil rights upon the Negro, and contended that such action should be left to the States. He thereby offered no constitutional objection to the bestowal of civil rights upon the Negro, but advanced a principle, the acceptance of which would forever preclude his enjoying them. To this proposition Rapier could not assent. That the Negro was considered to possess no rights under the Constitution, he maintained, was fully demonstrated by Kentucky and other Southern States, in which they were denied the privilege of testifying in court against a white man, were refused the right to education by the destruction of their schools and the visitation of violence upon their teachers, and were prevented by the Ku Klux Klan from exercising their right of suffrage. Such actions, he insisted, were in conflict with the contention that the States would eventually confer upon Negroes civil rights. In conclusion he declared that the Negro had earned all the rights that he then exercised as well as those enjoyed by other citizens, that the current conditions constituted a stricture on the fair name