Rutherford B. Hayes

"Hideous things happened in the decades after the Civil War. Freed slaves who tried to vote were beaten, jailed, lynched. Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan stopped thousands from registering." That is how Associated Press reporter Katherine Rizzo opened a recent column about Rutherford B. Hayes and the abortive efforts by the Hayes Presidential Library to secure federal funding. Taking her cue from the opposition of a St. Louis Congressman (Democrat William Clay), …

…education. The national government should, by "appropriations from the Treasury of the United States," support local public education. In an 1880 letter to Frank Hatton of Burlington, Iowa, Hayes admitted "there is still in our country a dangerous practical denial of the equal rights with respect to voting secured to colored citizens by the fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution.." Again the answer was education. Hayes continued to hold these views to the end of his life.