Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/180

150 George H. White, who was at that time the sole Negro member of Congress. Among his many protests of discrimination, appeals for just treatment, and discourses on the upright character of his race, there were no speeches more significant nor more prophetic than his arraignment of the apathetic manner with which Congress had greeted his bill, designed "to give to the federal government entire jurisdiction over all cases of lynching and death by mob violence." If, he declared, the nation is to avoid the state of anarchy and moral decay to which conditions were then rapidly leading, there remained no alternative, save the enactment, by some future Congress, of a law to constitute lynching a federal offense.

Despite the great significance attached by many of the Congressmen to the civil rights of the Negroes, that of the education of the freedman was considered hardly less important. One of the first Negro Congressmen to commit himself on this problem was Rainey of South Carolina. That he had the proper grasp of the educational needs of his country is shown by his forceful speech made for national aid to education. He contended that the natural result of this mental improvement will be to impart a better understanding of our institutions, and thus cultivate a loyal disposition and lofty appreciation for them. "The military prowess and demonstrated superiority of the Prussians, when compared to the French, especially in the late war [The Franco-Prussian War]," said he, "is attributable to the fact that the masses of the former were better educated and trained than those of the latter. The leavening spirit of the German philosophers has apparently pervaded all classes of the population of that empire."

The same problem of the education of the Negroes evoked from Walls, of Florida, an opinion replete with