Using the text below, select the best central idea from the answer choices.
For fifteen years I have resided in Washington, and while it was far from being a paradise for colored people when I first touched these shores it has been doing its level best ever since to make conditions for us intolerable. As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, a stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head. Unless I happened to know colored people who live here or ran across a chance acquaintance who could recommend a colored boarding-house to me, I should be obliged to spend the entire night wandering about.
~Mary E. Church Terrell, "What it Means to be Colored in the Capital of the United States" speech, October 10, 1906
Black Americans cannot vote throughout most of the capital city.
Conditions for Black Americans are getting better.
Discrimination of Black Americans occurs.
Conditions for Black Americans are excruciating.