Justice & Law Quote by George H. White

There is a blade hidden in White's calm syntax: he flips "ignorance" from a personal flaw into a state-sponsored project. The line refuses the patronizing premise that formerly enslaved Black Americans were simply "uneducated" and replaces it with a more damning truth: illiteracy was engineered, policed, and punished. "Hardly fair" reads almost polite, but it's a courtroom phrase, an indictment disguised as etiquette. He's not asking for sympathy; he's demanding a different standard of judgment.

The specific intent is defensive and offensive at once. White shields Black citizens from the easy smear that they are unfit for civic life, while prosecuting the "former order of things" for manufacturing that very condition. The move is strategically modern: shift the conversation from individual responsibility to structural constraint, from culture to power. If ignorance is criminalized knowledge, then the moral deficit belongs to the regime that wrote the laws, not the people forced to live under them.

The religious reference is doing double work. By invoking "the Word of God", White taps the language most likely to penetrate a predominantly Christian political audience, and he exposes the hypocrisy of a society that claimed biblical legitimacy while forbidding Black people to read the Bible. The subtext is lethal: you denied us literacy, then blamed us for lacking it; you preached salvation, then outlawed the tools of salvation. In Reconstruction and its backlash, that's not rhetoric for decoration. It's a demand that citizenship be measured against history's sabotage.