Chicago, June 28—A million dollar fund to fight segregation, Jim Crow and disfranchisement, “the last vestiges of slavery,” was launched yesterday afternoon in the Auditorium Theatre at a mass meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, now holding its 17th Annual Conference here. The fund was launched during an address by the Secretary of the Association, James Weldon Johnson of New York, ex-U.S. Consul to Nicaragua and Venezuela, writer, and editor of compilations of Negro poetry and spirituals.
“What American Negroes need and what we propose to begin raising now,” declared Mr. Johnson, “is a fund of $1 million to fight segregation, Jim Crow and disfranchisement, these being the last vestiges of slavery.
“Such a fund will be a demonstration of the mass power which the Negro intends to use and will serve notice to the country of the Negro’s determination to secure and maintain every fundamental right which should be his in common with other Americans.
“It is possible and feasible for American Negroes to raise this million dollar fund. The race has the money and can give. The demonstration was recently given in the quick raising of a Legal Defense Fund of more than $70,000.
“The American Negro asks no allowances, for what may be his shortcomings or his lapses. But he does demand equality of treatment. Ignorant white men have rights; poverty-stricken white men had rights; and even white criminals have certain rights; and these rights belong to them regardless of their condition. We intend to see that unhappily circumstanced black Americans have the same guarantees and opportunities as unhappily circumstanced white Americans.
“We shall, moreover, use this power to smash the practices which allow the most unkempt white persons to travel under the neatest first class conditions, while the neatest colored persons must travel Jim Crow; that allow the most ignorant white citizens to vote and bar the most intelligent black citizens; that allow a white man charged with a crime to be tried by a court of law and a black one to burned by a mob at the stake.
From the front page of The Star of Zion, official organ of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, Charlotte, N.C., Thursday, July 1, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sf88092969/1926-07-01/ed-1/seq-1/
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