If it is true that white Americans only need a demonstration of the colored man’s capacity for elevation, in order to make them willing to receive him on the same platform of human rights upon which they stand, why has not the intelligence…
Angelina Emily Grimké
The Public Record
Angelina Emily Grimké Weld was an American abolitionist, political activist, women's rights advocate, and supporter of the women's suffrage movement. At one point she was the best known, or "most notorious," woman in the country. She and her sister Sarah Moore Grimké were considered the only notable examples of white Southern women abolitionists. The sisters lived together as adults, while Angelina was the wife of abolitionist leader Theodore Dwight Weld.
gutenberg.org
These professions of a wish to plant the tree of Liberty on the shores of Africa, in order to convince our Republican Despotism of the high moral and intellectual worth of the colored man, are perfectly absurd.
I have been in the habit, for several years past, of watching the workings of my own mind under true and false charges against myself; and my experience is, that the more clear I am of the charge, the less I care about it.
Every true friend of the oppressed American has great cause to rejoice, that the cloak of benevolence has been torn off from the monster Prejudice, which could love the colored man after he got to Africa, but seemed to delight to pour…
Why not let us live in America, if you really love us?
Surely you never want to ‘get rid’ of people whom you love.
I like to have such near me; and it is because I love the colored Americans, that I want them to stay in this country; and in order to make it a happy home to them, I am trying to talk down, and write down, and live down this horrible…
No--we must dig up the weed by the roots out of each of our hearts.
He feels kindly toward the individual, because he is an instrument of his enjoyment, a mere means to promote his wishes.
And so the colored people are to be taught to be ‘very humble’ and ‘unassuming,’ ‘gentle’ and ‘meek,’ and then the ‘pity and generosity’ of their fellow citizens are to be appealed to.
Now, no one who knows anything of the influence of Abolitionists over the colored people, can deny that it has been peaceful and christian; had it not been so, they never would have seen those whom they had regarded as their best friends…
The great fundamental principle of Abolitionists is, that man cannot rightfully hold his fellow man as property.