Negro property will be burned and Negro blood will be shed, and that without stint or mercy.
Archibald Henry Grimké
The Public Record
Archibald Henry Grimké was an African-American lawyer, intellectual, journalist, diplomat and community leader in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He graduated from freedmen's schools, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and Harvard Law School, and served as American Consul to the Dominican Republic from 1894 to 1898. He was an activist for the rights of Black Americans, working in Boston and Washington, D.C. He was a national vice-president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as president of its Washington, D.C. chapter.
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A flaming spirit will presently appear in the midst of that meeting, and it will not be the flaming spirit of liberty, but of a Southern mob on arson and murder bent.
Well, if any group of Negroes in almost any part of the South are hunting for trouble, let them get up a public meeting for such a purpose, and give vent to the righteous indignation against oppressions which ought to stir the blood of any…
Another of the sacred rights which appertain to the Negro's American citizenship is the right of public assembly to consider his grievances and discuss measures for their redress.
He may not be able to enlighten the public but the associated press dispatch will give the grim facts relating to the end of that editor, who undertook to monkey with the buzz saw of the freedom of the press in a Southern community.
Freedom of the press is another of their rights, one of the boasted bulwarks of the Constitution.
Does anyone suppose that they would be allowed to say publicly what they think about the un-Christian and undemocratic way in which they are treated?
If one doubts this, let him go into the South and let him venture to incite the Negroes there to an assertion of their rights.
The South has never failed to get its separate cars, while the Negro has never failed either to receive the most unequal accommodations in open violation of the provisions of that bill.
The separate car feature of the Railroad Rate Bill was inserted in deference to the demand of the South, and the equal accommodation feature as an act of plain commercial justice to the Negro.
He appeals to good men and true in the South and in the North and in the Government too, to give him what he is entitled to.
One-half of it appears in the light clothed with fragments of his rights, and the other half is in eclipse, exposed naked to biting cold and bitter wrong.