As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, a stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head.... The colored man alone is thrust out of the hotels of the national capital like a leper.... Surely nowhere in the world do oppression and persecution based solely on the color of the skin appear more hateful and hideous than in the capital of the United States, because the chasm between the principles upon which this Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawn so wide and deep.

Mary Church Terrell
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