public schools, the secondary schools, the
academies, the universities, and the professional schools, how much
more imperatively necessary must it be that the Negro should have like
training. It seems to me that he should not only have the same
training but that he should have more of it than the white man has.
His education should be physical, moral, intellectual, social,
industrial and political, and his educational processes should have
the highest structural affinity with the educational processes of the
whites so that he may be brought into national and political
assimilation with the white man's institutional life.
TOPIC V.
SHOULD THE IGNORANT AND NON-PROPERTY-HOLDING NEGRO BE ALLOWED TO VOTE?
BY JOHN P. GREEN.
[Illustration: Hon. John P. Green]
HON. JOHN P. GREEN.
Hon. John P. Green was born in 1845 at New Berne, N. C., of
free parents. As a boy twelve years of age, he went with his
widowed mother to Cleveland, Ohio. He was educated in the
Cleveland public schools, graduating from the Central High
School in 1869.
He was admitted to the bar of South Carolina in 1870.
Returning to Cleveland, he for nine years served as justice
of the peace. In 1881 he was elected member of the Ohio
Legislature, serving three terms. In 1897 he was appointed
to a position in the postoffice department by President
McKinley.
He was also delegate to the National Republican Convention
in 1872, in 1884 and 1896.
All citizens who are industrious, honest, brave and patriotic should
vote, without regard to their color; for, a man may possess all these
characteristics and yet be "ignorant." Ignorance is only relative
anyway.
(a) The Negro is a citizen. See XIV Amendment to Constitution, etc.
(b) He is industrious, and by his industry has not only helped to
develop the resources of the United States but he has produced much of
the property which is unjustly held by many white voters, and withheld
from him; especially in the South.
The property of the South is due not more to the capital invested in
the agricultural and manufacturing enterprises of that section than to
the labor of the Negro, who furnishes the foundation of all
wealth--labor--there.
(c) The untutored Negro has shown himself to be honest; he has never
betrayed a trust imposed in him. During the great Civil War he was
true to the trust imposed in him by
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