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70 The Crisis

of the public peace. In some places they are attacked if they engage in certain employments which the whites wish to monopolize and violence may be used in the effort to prevent them. Would the police power justify a law forbidding them to act as chauffeurs in Miami, or to engage in any lawful employment anywhere, because they might be attacked if they did so? If so, they have no rights. If not, this ordinance cannot be sustained, for it is defended on the ground that one body of citizens may take from another their clear rights in order to prevent lawless attacks upon the latter by the former. The only policeman who ever fancied that such a police power existed was the wolf in his dealings with the lamb.

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The question is whether the majority of the people dwelling in any locality may say to the minority, "You shall not have the rights of other men to live where you please, but shall be limited to certain localities, not because you have violated any laws human or divine, or have done anything to make you bad neighbors, but because you are what God made you and because we consider ourselves your natural superiors, no matter what our habits or our qualities, because our complexion is different."

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No more important question can be presented to this Court. The interests of ten million citizens are at stake. In their efforts to rise from slavery to equality with their fellow-men they are everywhere met by the effort to keep them down and to deny them that equal opportunity which the Constitution secures to us all. If they can be forbidden to live on their own land they can be forbidden to work at their own trade. If this is possible, the prejudice against which the Fourteenth Amendment was framed to defend the Negroes triumphs over it, and the amendment itself becomes a dead letter. If it does not protect the rights of all citizens, it does not protect the rights of any, since it knows no distinction of race or color.

CLAYTON B. BLAKEY,
MOORFIELD STOREY.

MAMMY
By OTTO LELAND BOHANAN

She held him in her bronzen arms
And fed him from her lavish breast,
And rid him of a child's alarms,
With songs that gave him rest.

He loved her tenderly, he said,
And vowed to fill her life with pleasure.
He's growing old and she is dead,
A picture in his memory's treasure.

But once he paused upon the bench
Ere yet he spake the final sentence
Upon a slender black-faced wench,
Whose eyes were grim with unrepentance:

"Old Mammy's child! Tut! Tut! 'Tis bad
For one so young to mock the law.
Your mother's eyes must deepen sad,
she looked upon these things with awe".

[[image - photograph of Mammy]]

Shadows of Light

[[image - photograph]]
[[caption]] THE LATE REV. C.M.C. MASON. (see page 84) [[/caption]]