THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT AND THE RACE
QUESTION.
SECTION I. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States ; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
SEC. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of per- sons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for president and vice-president of the United States, representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state.
SEC. 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legis- lation, the provisions of this article.
The past decade has witnessed a remarkable extension of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, in comparison with the original view which regarded it as prohibiting only dis- crimination because of race or color, and an even more remark- able neglect of the second section. The first section, intended mainly, if not wholly, for the benefit of the negroes, having been applied by analogy to the Chinese also, its protection was extended in the course of time to railroad and turnpike corpora- tions, and finally to persons neither colored nor artificial. It is now pertinent to inquire : How far has it secured the end for which it was primarily intended ? How far has it secured to the negroes the equal protection of the laws ?
It is a small matter, comparatively speaking, that Congress was unable to guarantee the negroes equal treatment in hotels
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