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[July 14, 1913]

152

[stamp]
THE WHITE HOUSE
JULY 14 1913
RECEIVED

Colored #

Hon. H.K.Vardaman,
X
U.S. Senate, Washinston, D.C.

My dear Sir:

Reading in the Washington Post of July 13 that you intended calling
on the Hon. Woodrow Wilson respecting a curtail of Negre preferment, I beg
to ask your attention to the consideration of the question from other angles.

I am connected with an institution which is engaged in a work which
aims to prevent and does prevent to a limited extent the very unsatisfactory
conduct which you condemn and which is the result of race-backwardness.

History seems not to reveal a single instance where the success of a
dominant people, which you labor so assidously to bring about, has been assured
through its unjust repression of a different but integral race. On the other
hand the development of America is phenomenal just to the extent that It has
meant opportunity to all who would try to realise its ideals and live by Its
standards.

I feel that you have discovered in your wide experience that the unde-
sirable Negro is just as small a proportion of the whole race, considering its
relative backwardness, as is the undesirable element of any similar group. I
can assert without fear of contradiction that the trained negro, taught in a
Christian home and in good schools suffers as keenly from every moral lapse
of his people as it is possible for man to feel a disgrace which touches him and
which he is powerless to prevent. His regard for all women is marked by that
chivalrous sentiment which is not confined to any race, creed or color and he
proves it in the thousands of relations which he bears in his employment as he
proved it beyond denial during the desperate days of the Civil strife.

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