"What It Means to be Colored in Capital of the U.S." by 瑪麗.泰瑞
thank you very much.
washington, d.c., has been called "the colored man's paradise." whether this sobriquet was given to the national capital in bitter irony by a member of the handicapped race, as he reviewed some of his own persecutions and rebuffs, or whether it was given immediately after the war by an ex-slaveholder who for the first time in his life saw colored people walking about like free men, minus the overseer and his whip, history saith not. it is certain that it would be difficult to find a worse misnomer for washington than "the colored man's paradise" if so prosaic a consideration as veracity is to determine the appropriateness of a name.
for fifteen years i have resided in washington, and while it was far from being a paradise for colored people when i first touched these shores it has been doing its level best ever since to make conditions for us intolerable. as a colored woman i might enter washington any night, a stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head. unless i happened to know colored people who live here or ran across a chance acquaintance who could recommend a colored boarding-house to me, i should be obliged to spend the entire night wandering about. indians, chinamen, filipinos, japanese and representatives of any other dark race can find hotel accommodations, if they can pay for them. the colored man alone is thrust out of the hotels of the national capital like a leper.
as a colored woman i may walk from the capitol to the white house, ravenously hungry and abundantly supplied with money with which to purchase a meal, without finding a single restaurant in which i would be permitted to take a morsel of food, if it was patronized by white people, unless i were willing to sit behind a screen. as a colored woman i cannot visit the tomb of the father of this country, which owes its very existence to the love of freedom in the human heart and which stands for equal opportunity to all, without being forced to sit in the jim crow section of an electric car which starts form the very heart of the city– midway between the capital and the white house. if i refuse thus to be humiliated, i am cast into jail and forced to pay a fine for violating the virginia laws....
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