In the case of some of the Negro Congressmen measures designed either
to promote the welfare of their race or to give publicity to its
achievement commanded precedence over all others. Many offered
petitions and bills providing especially for the benefit of Negroes.
Benjamin Turner, of Alabama, secured from the Federal Government
several thousands of dollars in payment of a claim for damages to his
property during the Civil War. In the Fifty-first Congress, Thomas E.
Miller submitted two measures in the interest of his race.[94] The
first proposed the establishment of a home for indigent freedmen, and
the second sought to authorize the erection of a monument in
commemoration of the Negro soldiers who fought for the Union in the
Civil War.
The World's Columbian Exposition received much consideration during
the first session of the Fifty-second Congress. Henry P. Cheatham,[95]
a representative from North Carolina, during the course of his remarks
on the Negro race urged that Congress make provisions for exhibiting,
at that fair, the facts and statistics of the progress that the Negro
had made during his thirty years of freedom. He deplored the fact that
"politics" had crept into the amendment designed to effect his purpose
and urged its acceptance as a matter of encouragement and justice to a
numerically significant group of the American people. Cheatham
proposed, also, a measure which sought to have printed the historical
record of the Negro troops in the wars in which they had participated.
The welfare of the race was often reflected in the remarks of George
W. Murray, a Congressman from South Carolina. When, in the Fifty-third
Congress, there arose, in connection with the proposal that federal
aid be extended to the Atlanta Exposition,[96] the question of the
progress of the Negro race, Murray favored such an exposition because,
he declared, it would offer opportunity to have registered the facts
and statistics of the Negro's achievement since emancipation. As
evidence of the inventive genius of his race, he submitted to Congress
at this time a list of patents which had been granted by the
government for the inventions of Negroes. Murray spoke briefly of what
the Negroes were doing and thinking and, in conclusion, gave to the
effort for federal aid his unqualified endorsement.
Measures proposed by George H. White, a representative from North
Carolina to the Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth Congresses, tended mainly
to promote the social welfare of his race.[97] One of these was a
resolution for the consideration of a bill to provide a home for aged
and infirm Negroes. His other measures of this sort were bills to pay
the wages of the Negro Civil War-time employees withheld by the War
Department, to incorporate a "National Colored American Association,"
and to provide for the exhibit of the educational and industrial
progress of the Negro at the Paris Exposition of 1900. Few measures of
this type could become law.