No power over a private school?
Then the teacher might be a disseminator
of atheism, communism, anarchism, free love,
and any other gospel destructive to the pupils
and to the State.
According to this bewildering Judge Gibbs,
any sort of immoral or illegal, or debasing
instruction can be injected into the body
politic, provided the school is private.
Has the State no right of self-protection?
Has the State no sovereign power to-decide
what is for and against public policy?
Has the State no right to regulate all mat
ters concerning her domestic welfare?
In Georgia, the State does not allow me to
sell my own seed cotton, between suns; it's
against public policy. No man may lawfully
sell his own gasoline at night; it’s against
public policy.
Private homes are quarantined and schools
closed as a matter of public policy, to prevent
the spread of contagious disease.
Private boarding-houses, private locker
clubs, private gaming rooms, private assigna
tion houses are all amenable to State law.
Down at Miami, they have been applying
some very strenuous —and much needed —law
to private road-houses; those unmitigated
pests wherein so many girls end their joy
rides by landing in hell.
But it seems that the State has no power
over private schools.
The sovereign State cannot say that it is
against public policy to have white teachers
in negro schools.
If the rankest Booker Washington came
into Florida, to teach social equality to white
children, the State could not protect itself!
.Yet the Romanist city of Baltimore has a
THE JEFFERSONIAN
law forbidding negroes to live in a section
where the majority is white, and vice versa.
When I was in Texas in 1904, the conductor
put me out of the car which had been reserved
for the exclusive use of negroes.
