Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/194

 especially for the benefit of Negroes. Benjamin Turner, of Alabama, secured from the Federal Government several thousands of dollars in payment of a claim for damages to his property during the Civil War. In the Fifty-first Congress, Thomas E. Miller submitted two measures in the interest of his race. The first proposed the establishment of a home for indigent freedmen, and the second sought to authorize the erection of a monument in commemoration of the Negro soldiers who fought for the Union in the Civil War.

The World's Columbian Exposition received much consideration during the first session of the Fifty-second Congress. Henry P. Cheatham, a representative from North Carolina, during the course of his remarks on the Negro race urged that Congress make provisions for exhibiting, at that fair, the facts and statistics of the progress that the Negro had made during his thirty years of freedom. He deplored the fact that "politics" had crept into the amendment designed to effect his purpose and urged its acceptance as a matter of encouragement and justice to a numerically significant group of the American people. Cheatham proposed, also, a measure which sought to have printed the historical record of the Negro troops in the wars in which they had participated.

The welfare of the race was often reflected in the remarks of George W. Murray, a Congressman from South Carolina. When, in the Fifty-third Congress, there arose, in connection with the proposal that federal aid be extended to the Atlanta Exposition, the question of the progress of the Negro race, Murray favored such an exposition because, he declared, it would offer opportunity to have registered the facts and statistics of the Negro's achievement since emancipation. As evidence of the inventive genius of his race, he submitted to Congress at this time a list of patents