250 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
the actual administration of the law should be too marked, the federal courts might put a stop to it, as they did to the perse- cution of the Chinamen in San Francisco. 1 The Supreme Court has upheld the language of the Mississippi law, but not its actual working.
At all events, the second section of the Fourteenth Amend- ment, reducing the representation in Congress of states which abridge the suffrage, should be strictly enforced. This provision was intended especially to prevent the disfranchisement of the negro, and, as if with prophetic foresight, it was expressed in such general terms that it unquestionably applies even to dis- franchisement through educational tests ; yet its language is so mathematically explicit that it requires no interpretation, but requires simply to be enforced. A writer in the North American Review recently proposed, as the one straight road out of the existing difficulty, a constitutional amendment basing both suf- frage and representation upon literacy, and added: "If the South, however, will not consent to a scheme so fair, then the Fourteenth Amendment to the federal constitution should be rigidly enforced." But why not enforce the constitution as it now stands, even before trying to amend it further ?
There is still another form of discrimination against the negroes which is more fundamental, more insidious, more dangerous, more lasting in its effects, than even the denial of the suffrage. In too many of the southern states negro chil- dren are virtually denied the same education as white children, by laws requiring the school taxes paid by whites to go to the support of white schools, and leaving the colored schools only those paid by negroes. Where the blacks make up nearly or quite half the total population, and own but a small fraction of the wealth, the result can be nothing but inferior schools ; and, as a matter of fact, the colored schools have even shorter terms than the white schools, with underpaid and overworked teachers. Dr. Spahr's investigations have shown this to be .the case in more than one of the southern states, 2 and his conclusions are
Yick Wa vs. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356.
- The Outlook, 58 : 510 (February 26, 1898), and 62 : 496 (July I, 1899).
