“Open Letter”

The “Open letter to President McKinley” written by the colored people of Massachusetts describes how the colored people were being treated in the united states, mainly in the south. And now they, the color people, were approaching to the president since the states and everywhere throughout the south their rights as citizens were being denied. Through this letter they were letting him know once again clarifying that he did not ignored this “you have seen our sufferings, witnessed from your high place our awful wrongs and miseries” and yet, he had done nothing about it. Now they were asking for the execution of all their rights guaranteed to them by the constitution and laws of the union, the “protection, security in our life, our liberty, and in the pursue of our individual and social happiness under a government” (p 45). They also described how they were suffering and all the ways they were suffering. They were saying that it wasn’t their fault that more than two hundred years of involuntary  servitude which produced ignorance, poverty, and degradation, and just because of the color of their skin didn’t deserve any rights, if they were as much as humans as the whites, and therefore as much as citizens. The letter also says that how they can call themselves Christians, having all that hate and acting with so much violence against the color people; indeed they were all equal, that they were all God’s children from whom Jesus died. They bring to their minds various recent cases where they rights of the blacks were denied “events in Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia, and Louisiana, as well as in Georgia and the Carolinas, indeed throughout the south” (p 50). An example of these atrocities was a crime committed in Georgia where a negro charged with murder assault was taken quiet from his captors and “burned to death with indescribable and hellish cruelty in the presence of cheering thousands of the so- called best people of Georgia, men, women and children who had gone forth on the Christian Sabbath to the burning of a human being as to a country festival and holyday of innocent enjoyment and amusement” (p 49).    Having put all those examples of the oppression they were living, then they go ahead and bring up the Cuban revolution. They stated that how can he and the congress had helped Cuba by helping them with their independence from Spain and  acknowledging that they had the rights to be free, and how and why couldn’t they  help the Negros in their own country to practice their rights. They also emphasized that if he had the will to impose the rights to the freedmen then he had a way to do so. They wrote “where there is will with the constitutional lawyers and rulers there is always a way, and where there is no will, there is no way” (p 47). By saying this, they laid all the responsibility, and final hopes on him.