FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO AARON M. POWELL¹Born in Clinton, New York, Aaron Macy Powell (1832–99), a Quaker, left farming to become a reformer. He was a lecturing agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society from 1852 to 1865 and then was an editor of the and its successor, the , until 1872. Powell then edited the . In the 1880s, he helped found the American Purity Alliance and edited its periodical, the . Philadelphia , 20 May 1899, 389; Merrill and Ruchames, , 9: 499–500.

Washington, D.C. 7 October 1870.

A. M. POWELL, ESQ.—

I am just here from Westminster, Carroll Co., Maryland,²Douglass had moved to the District of Columbia from Rochester in September 1870. Douglass addressed an audience at the Odd Fellows Hall in Westminster, Maryland. That community, thirty miles northwest of downtown Baltimore in heavily agricultural Carroll County, had been an important Union army supply base during the Civil War. Westminster (Md.) , 13 October 1870; , 1 September 1870; , 17 September 1870; Seltzer, , 2081. where I have
been speaking on the very subject upon which you wish to hear me in
Cooper Institute. I cannot be with you on Monday night.³There are no reported speeches by Douglass anywhere in New York City for the remainder of 1870 or in 1871. Other duties
make it impossible. The refusal of the hotels in New York to receive and
accommodate refined and wealthy colored strangers and travellers, solely
because of their color, is the meanest kind of barbarism, and could happen
in no other civilized country.⁴Douglass was not alone in complaining of racial discrimination in New York City in the years immediately following the Civil War. In May 1873, the New York state legislature passed a civil rights statute to guarantee African Americans equal enjoyment of all forms of public accommodations, including hotels, trolleys, restaurants, and school systems. Even African Americans with considerable financial means found it difficult to obtain lodgings at many of New York City’s hotels. After a well-publicized campaign by the veteran African American leaders Henry Highland Garnet and Charles B. Reason, an antidiscrimination law was passed. Douglass and other former abolitionists had publicly endorsed the campaign of the Civil Rights Committee of New York. Willard B. Gatewood, (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), 3–4, 12, 19, 41–42, 110, 124–25, 200–01; David McBride, “Fourteenth Amendment Idealism: The New York State Civil Rights Law, 1873–1918,” , 71: 207–33 (April 1990); Myra B. Young Armstead, “Revisiting Hotels and Other Lodgings: American Tourist Spaces through the Lens of Black Pleasure-Travelers, 1880–1950,” , 25: 136–59 (2005). It belongs to free, democratic America, a
land of Bibles, Sabbath Schools, churches and missionary societies, (perpetually boasting of liberty, manners and morals as compared with other
nations) to furnish such examples of inhuman brutishness. Even a pig is
willing that a fellow pig shall have shelter and food, if he can get enough
for himself, but your genuine American negro hater surpasses the pig in
piggishness. He would rather have space itself entirely unoccupied than
to have it occupied by one not colored like himself. The same unbrotherly and inhuman spirit of pride and hate which excludes a respectable
man and woman from the shelter of a public house in New York or elsewhere, (the only apology for the existence of which is its accommodation
of strangers and travellers,) would shut him out of all houses and out of the
world. Neither in London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburgh, Rome, Vienna,
nor Constantinople,⁵Douglass refers to the capitals of the United Kingdom, France, Prussia, Russia, Italy (as of 2 October 1870), the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. would two decent persons with money in their pockets and willing to pay, be refused accommodation at any hotel on account
of color. But here in the city of New York, the commercial metropolis
of the United States, sustaining relations of commerce with all nations,
kindreds, tongues and peoples, men stoop to the narrowness and littleness to peep under a man’s hat to find out whether he shall for his money
and his manhood, be accommodated with food and shelter. This inhuman
treatment of men and women for a color which they cannot alter to suit
the taste of anybody, plainly enough tells the colored people that no part
of their number shall ever be respected as men or as gentlemen if the New
York hotels can degrade them.

After all it is not in its essence a prejudice against color that excludes
colored men from hotels or from other places. For certain purposes the
colored man is welcome anywhere. He can be employed to sweep the holy
dust from the velvet of the saintly pew, in which he would not be allowed
to worship God for one moment; he would be allowed to enter the most

aristocratic drawing-room car as a servant, but would be wholly unwelcome as a passenger; he would be admitted to any parlor or dining-room
in New York as a waiter, but never as a gentleman; as a driver he may ride
with fashionable ladies and gentlemen, who seem as proud of his dark rich
color as they are of the shining carriage, prancing bays, and the gold and
silver mountings of their equipage, but the skin-deep aristocracy of New
York would not tolerate in such place a colored man as a gentlemen—no
matter how refined or how elevated in character and attainments. It is,
therefore, not the negro’s color that makes him distasteful, but the assumption of equal manhood.

But after all, there is consolation here as everywhere. If a man is determined to be a man, a good citizen, a refined, well-mannered, and cultivated gentleman, there is no power, even in New York hotels, to prevent
him. Our hotels are powerful institutions, but they cannot long resist the
enlightened and humane spirit of the age. The colored man and all other
men will by and by be treated according to their character rather than
their color.

Truly yours,

FREDERICK DOUG LASS.

PLSr: NNE, 20 October 1870.