Secondly, anything that I may say in connection with the Supreme Court is not an attack upon it as an institution. Any comment I shall make in connection with it, will have to do with the usurpation of functions of that Court by the present occupants, and those immediately preceding it.

Senator HENNINGS. I take it that your testimony will relate to this legislation?

Mr. WILLIAMS. Yes, sir, in broad lines, however.

Secondly, anything I may say will also not be understood as trying to make any invidious comparisons between races. My emphasis will be largely upon the State rights, as we used to call them-I am a States Rights Democrat, when the Democratic Party was a States Rights Party, and I am still a States rights believer.

I am also a believer in the preservation of the races as God created them, or as we understood He created them. I know the 26th verse, the 17th chapter of the Book of Acts said He made separate habitations for the races, and I feel very much that we are now being punished because we violated the fourth commandment, which said that the sins of the parents shall be visited upon the children even to the fourth generation.

God Almighty, as I see it, put the black people in Africa and the white people some other place.

Senator HENNINGS. That is the fourth commandment, sir, that the sins of the parents shall be visited upon the children even unto the fourth generation?

Mr. WILLIAMS. Yes.

So we have a problem which has been brought upon us, unfortunately, and we are now being victimized by the shift of status of the people who came here as property, virtually.

Personally, I am a Jeffersonian and a Lincolnian in my beliefs in that respect. Both Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, contrary to public understanding, were not only for the separation of the races but were for deporting the colored race. Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, unlike our own people today, had a sense of perspective, and saw that there were two problems involved there, not one.

Most people looked at the problem of the liberation of the colored race, but Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln-I will quote from them, if you want me to do it.

Senator HENNINGS. It won't be necessary.

Mr. WILLIAMS. Then you will accept my statement?

Senator HENNINGS. No, I don't necessarily accept your statement, but we will not take the time to quote it.

Mr. WILLIAMS. If you don't accept, then may I quote it?

Senator HENNINGS. Very well. Mr. Lincoln said a lot of things on the subject, and so did Mr. Jefferson. It depends entirely upon what you are quoting. Go ahead, sir, please.

Mr. WILLIAMS. I am giving you my basic position, sir.

Senator HENNINGS. Yes.

Mr. WILLIAMS. And not only did Mr. Lincoln say it, but his Cabinet also apparently was in favor of division.

I will take Mr. Lincoln's statement here as to the separation, rather than go into any broad dealings with his statements, and I have a number of them.

If you will permit me, I would like very much to file with your committee a 40-page discussion entitled "The Constitution, States Rights, and the Segregation Cases."

Senator HENNINGS. It may be accepted and made a part of the file. (The document referred to is as follows:)

THE CONSTITUTION, STATES RIGHTS

AND THE SEGREGATION CASES

A Speech Delivered Before the Baltimore City Association for States Rights, Inc. and the Maryland Petition Committee

by George Washington Williams

THE CONSTITUTION, STATES RIGHTS AND

THE SEGREGATION CASES

A Speech Delivered Before the Baltimore City Association for States Rights, Inc. and the Maryland Petition Committee, by George Washington Williams.*

I approach this subject essentially from the States Rights angle, as I have always been a strong advocate of local self-government, and these Segregation Cases come fully within the ambit of the 10th Amendment, and the otherwise reserved powers of the States, as also contemplated by our long-cherished dual form of government. I look upon those Decisions as carpetbag in character, as they impose upon the States something that ought to be handled from the local viewpoint. Carpetbagging is carpetbagging whether the imposition is from the inside or the outside, and those decisions are as viciously carpetbagging as anything that that monstrous politician Thaddeus Stevens, as George Sokolsky called him, worked in the South. This is another "On To Richmond" movement, and is destructive of our dual system of government, one of the most fundamental of our Federal governmental institutions.

In view of the high authority of the Supreme Court, its exalted station, and the co-ordinate position that it occupies in our system of government, and its decision in the Segregation Cases, it is deemed meet and proper, indeed demanded, that some detailed reasons and justifications should be presented for disagreeing with the decision in the said cases, which I now shall proceed to do.

I. The Court, it is alleged, made statements of fact and inferences in its opinion in the Bolling Case which it is believed are not in accordance with the facts of history, such as the statement that the separation of the white and negro races is contrary to our "traditions." (Bolling vs. Sharpe, 347 U. S. 497).

II. And, again, the Court said that, "In the first cases in this Court construing the Fourteenth Amendment, decided shortly after its adoption, the Court interpreted it as proscribing all-State-imposed dis

*From "Who's Who in America":

WILLIAMS, George Washington, judge; b. Fredericktown, Cecil Co., Md., Dec. 12, 1885; LL.B., Baltimore Law Sch. (now dept. of U. of Md.), 1908. Practiced in Baltimore, 1907-21; police judge, 1912; asst. city solicitor, 1918; mem. Park Bd., 1915-19; legal adviser to Govt. of Virgin Islands, 1921-24, municipal judge, St. Thomas, 1921-24; U. S. Dist. judge of V. I., Aug. 14, 1924-30. Mem. Am., Md. & City Bar Assn., Colonial War Society, S.A.R., Soc. War of 1812, Eastern Shore Soc., 231 St. Paul Place, Baltimore, Md.

criminations against the Negro race," citing the Slaughter House Cases, 16 Wall 36, 67-72 (1873), and Strauder vs. West Virginia, 100 U. S. 303, 307-308 (1879), and in so doing, the Court ignored the cases directly discussing and disposing of the subject, and, it is believed and asserted, ignored the substance of even the cases referred to, as we shall see.

III. And, again, the Court discriminated, by ignoring the psychological and other effects on the white children of the country and the social aspects of the problem, and used in those respects the works of people whose interest, in the belief of many, lay in the direction of integration and amalgamation.

IV. The Court ignored the salutary principle of stare decisis. These positions of the Supreme Court in the Instant Case supply the basis of the following allegations and refutations, to-wit:

I.

First, it is to be remembered that the Court called for a second argument of the Segregation Cases to be elightened as to the intention of the Congress in proposing, and the States in adopting, the XIV Amendment, and thereafter proceeded to ignore the best evidence on the subject, as will be herein shown.

Now, the opinion of the Court contains, in our judgment, several important false assumptions of fact, as well as false conclusions of law, and if their premises are in important parts false, their conclusion must likewise be false in important respects.

In the first place, absolute equality is not required, only substantially equal facilities. The Supreme Court has recently said, speaking through the late Chief Justice Vinson, that there are no absolutes in this world.1 If there are no absolutes in this world, the adopters of the XIV Amendment cannot be said to have been thinking of absolute equality when those words, equal protection of the laws, were used. They were, perforce, speaking with human understanding, and in the ordinary sense of these words. That there were wise men before Chief Justice Vinson and his Court, we may assume.

From long before the establishment of the present Federal Government, and also of its predecessor, the Articles of Confederation, slavery had existed, and was, in fact, virtually confirmed, certainly recognized,

1 Dennis vs. United States, 341 U. S. 494, 508.

In Capitol Greyhound Lines vs. Brice 339 U. S. 560, Justice Frankfurter, dissenting, remarked, showing the devious methods of the Court, that "*** the Court attempted to avoid difficulties through what seems to me to be an exercise in absolutes", something that we have seen the Court eschewed through Vinson, C. J. Reinforcing this view, he further said that, "the Constitution does not require pure reason, only practical reason"." However, he seemed to overlook this sage criticism of the Court in the Segregations.