shut out from all the common rights, and privileges and opportunities enjoyed by the lowest of the favored race.  They were denied equality in the public school.  The principle of popular education had no application to a class which was not of the people, a class which the common sentiment of a Christian nation had placed at the zero point of political values, and meant to keep forever at that point.  Entrance to the trades were barred to the blacks.  What did they want with such things where there was no white trash so forgetful of his superiority as to consent to work by their side.  Nowhere were they allowed the same traveling accommodations as white men, and they were everywhere excluded from public inns.  Neither wealth nor refinement was able to procure them admission into other than “Jim Crow cars.”  If heart-sick at the outrages by every one heaped upon them they turned for consolation to the house of God, even there the spirit of proscription and caste prejudice met them, and pointed to the “negro pew” where they sat corraled from the congregation as if they had no equal share in the salvation which the pulpit preached.  Everywhere the white man had the right of way, even on the highway to heaven!  And in no place was the negro made to feel the prejudice against his color more gallingly than in churches arrogating the name of Christian.  He had no rights on earth, he had none in trying to get into the bosom of the founder of Christianity, which the white sinners or saints were bound to respect.  Even the liberty-loving Quakers of Philadelphia were not above the use of the “negro seat” in their meetings.  Somehow they discerned that there was a great gulf separating in this life at least the white from the black believer.  That God had made of one blood all nations of men, St. Paul had taught, but the American church had with one accord in practice drawn the line at the poor despised colored man.  He was excluded from ecclesiastical equality, for he was different from other men for whom Christ died.  The Bible declared that man was made but a little lower than the angels; the American people in their State and Church supplemented this sentiment by acts which plainly said that the negro was made but a little above the brute creation.

Here are instances of the length to which the prejudice against color carried the churches in those early years of the anti-slavery movement: 

In 1830, a colored man, through a business transaction with a lessee of one of the pews in Park Street Church, came into possession of it.  Thinking to make the best use of his opportunity to obtain religious instruction for himself and family from this fountain of orthodoxy, the black pew-holder betook him, one Sunday, to “Brimstone Corner.”  But he was never permitted to repeat the visit.  “Brimstone Corner” could not stand him another Lord’s day, and thereupon promptly expelled him and his family out of its midst.  The good deacons displayed their