APPENDIX 159 
strongly to this feature of the bill. On the score of justice, 
I should like to see the guilty exposed and punished; but 
in the interest of saving something from the wreck, I am 
for keeping out of the courts. 
Suffice it to say in conclusion that I like your bill as a 
whole. 
Respectfully yours, 
Frep’x DoucLass. 
5. EXTRACTS FROM THE TESTIMONY 
TAKEN IN 1910 
In 1910 Representative Austin of Tennessee asked for 
a hearing before the committee on Banking and Currency 
in support of House Bill No. 8776 to reimburse the de- 
positors of the Freedmen’s Bank and Trust Company 
which had failed thirty-six years before. The members of 
the committee appeared to be but little interested in the 
matter and to know but little about the history of the 
bank. Among those who spoke in support of the bill were 
three prominent negroes: J. H. Hayes of Richmond, Vir- 
ginia, lawyer and editor of St. Luke's Herald; Judson W. 
Lyons of Augusta, Georgia, formerly Register of the 
Treasury; and Reverend James L. White, president of the 
Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People, in Washington, 
D. C. The extracts which follow are from the statements 
of these men. 
Statement of J. H. Hayes: 
A gentleman asked the question as to the responsibility 
and liability of the Government, moral or legal, or what 
not. If you shut your eyes a minute and think of the men 
forty-five years ago, think of the chaos as compared to 
today, think of four or five millions of people turned loose, 
that they were free and could go among people and engage 
in the thrift and enterprises of the country, and there came 
from Washington—and everything was now at Washing- 
ton, it was the Mecca then of all the Negro ideas and 
hopes—a mission, what were these people to think but 
that the Government itself had sent them to help the