The Aristocracy of Skin
An editorial reflection on the prevalence of racial prejudice in the North and the exclusion of Black students and congregants from 'civilized' institutions.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Mr. John Lawrence Sullivan draws the color line in the prize ring, stating, 'No gentleman fighter can afford to meet a nigger.' Sullivan is a coarse, ignorant man, but the color line is drawn even more sharply by persons who ought to know better. Recently, in a Yale law school debate, a student named Wifley withdrew from the contest simply because he would have to meet a colored man. In Brooklyn, the board of education voted to organize a new school for the use of colored children alone, rejecting a plan to obliterate the color line. The aristocracy of skin dies hard even at the North. It is hardly more than five years ago that the Ohio legislature repealed black laws, and Massachusetts, the cradle of abolitionists, was once so full of color-phobia that churches had negro pews. Even today, resolutions to recognize no distinction of race in the Episcopal church are rejected. No wonder brutes draw the color line when intelligent Americans at the top of our civilization continue to draw it in the school, the church, the theater, and the hotel.
“The aristocracy of skin dies hard even at the North.”
This editorial captures the hypocrisy of the Northern states regarding racial equality during the post-Reconstruction era. It highlights how segregation was not just a Southern reality but a structural and social phenomenon embedded in the institutions of the North—an argument that remains central to modern historical re-evaluations of systemic racism in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
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