f the whites conflicted. He demanded for
them trial by jury, pay for their work, and the assurance that their
lynchers would not become also their legislators. These
considerations, he maintained, were of invaluable importance to the
country. Miller, furthermore, deplored the action of the Governor of
his State, which refused State aid to Negro schools and caused to be
closed certain white colleges which had the courage to consider, in a
sane way, the so-called Negro problem.

In the Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth Congresses, the questions of the
protection of the Negroes in the exercise of their civil rights
demanded virtually the entire attention of George H. White, who was
at that time the sole Negro member of Congress. Among his many
protests of discrimination, appeals for just treatment, and discourses
on the upright character of his race, there were no speeches more
significant nor more prophetic than his arraignment of the apathetic
manner with which Congress had greeted his bill, designed "to give to
the federal government entire jurisdiction over all cases of lynching
and death by mob violence." If, he declared, the nation is to avoid
the state of anarchy and moral decay to which conditions were then
rapidly leading, there remained no alternative, save the enactment, by
some future Congress, of a law to constitute lynching a federal
offense.[63]

EDUCATION

Despite the great significance attached by many of the Congressmen to
the civil rights of the Negroes, that of the education of the freedman
was considered hardly less important. One of the first Negro
Congressmen to commit himself on this problem was Rainey of South
Carolina. That he had the proper grasp of the educational needs of his
country is shown by his forceful speech made for national aid to
education. He contended that the natural result of this mental
improvement will be to impart a better understanding of our
institutions, and thus cultivate a loyal disposition and lofty
appreciation for them. "The military prowess and demonstrated
superiority of the Prussians, when compared to the French, especially
in the late war [The Franco-Prussian War]," said he, "is attributable
to the fact that the masses of the former were better educated and
trained than those of the latter. The leavening spirit of the German
philosophers has apparently pervaded all classes of the population of
that empire."[64]

The same problem of the education of the Negroes evo