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imprisonment. Is this right? The state of Ala Code 1946, forbade the banns of marriage between them, forced them to obey nature's law (man's necessity always) in an indiscriminate & brutal adultery. Shall the State now be allowed to take advantage of her own wrong by fining & jailing a negro for doing that, adultery, which her laws taught him to do & not doing that, getting married, which she [[crossed out]] taught [[/crossed out]] kept him from doing?
All crime consists in the intent of the mind. Does the negro intend wrong, when he commits adultery? From the patriarch of the plantation to the unfeathered urchin that begins to experiment on this little playmates before nature has supplied him with the power of gratifying his prurient appetite, he has seen nothing else in all the grades of negro-life, has learned nothing else but the customs & habits of his people. Again not only has the adultery, the adulterious life of his race been stamped by the approbation of his late masters, but they made it law for him thus, & thus alone, to indulge his natural passions. It cannot be then crime in him to live in this way. Adultery is not mala in se from his social, & educational stand point, & if no crime thus should be no punishment. The argument that the law is now changed & that he is as liable to be punished for adultery as a white, is well answered by his plea of ignorance of the new law. The state is stopped from denying his plea of ignorance because she made it an indictable offense to learn him to read, with her stony hand she scarfed up & shut out from him the light of learning, the means of