Page:Why colored people in Philadelphia are excluded from the street cars.djvu/7

5 she was colored, he ejected her with violence, and somewhat to her personal injury.

Thus stands this matter at present; and such has been the action of official bodies in it. Let us now see what has been that of the unofficial public, and what spirit that public has manifested towards it indirectly, by its action on kindred matters. This claim of the colored people to enter the cars, though a local question, is immediately connected with the great policy of Equality before the Law, which is now offering itself to the national acceptance; and any local fact which bears on the latter relates also to the former, and will be considered relevant to this subject.

And first, it is found that even colored women, when ejected from the cars with violence and insult, seldom meet with sympathy from the casual white passengers, of either sex, who are present, while the conductor often finds active partisans among them. But one white passenger has ever volunteered testimony in any case; and for want of this, generally the only proof possible, several cases have been dropped.

Events early last year, such as the voting in the cars, the petition of the men working at the Navy Yard for continued exclusion of colored people on the Second and Third Street Line, the "filibustering" of several hundred women, employed by the Government on army clothing, to defeat the Fifth and Sixth Street experiment of admission, and other acts of violence, show clearly that the classes represented by these men and women are bitterly opposed to admission.

Of our seven daily newspapers, two—the Press and Bulletin—have spoken out manfully and repeatedly in reproof of these outrages and in defence of the rights of the colored people. The others, it is believed, while admitting communications on both sides, have been editorially silent on the subject. In their local items, however, they have generally given a version of these disturbances unfavorable to the ejected colored people, under the heading of "riotous conduct of negroes," or some similar caption. Grand juries, from the way in which their members are brought together, may be supposed fairly to represent the average public sentiment on this question, and their uniform action has been