Judged by his rights on paper his citizenship is indisputable, but judged by his rights in fact it is full of mutilations and amputations which disfigure it almost beyond recognition.
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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And to this latter class belongs the Negro nearly every time and almost everywhere.
Surely there are American citizens and American citizens--citizens whom Government protects and enables to make good their claim to equality before the law, and other citizens whom Government does not protect or enable to make good their…
It is too busy attending to the more important business relating to the property rights and interests of shippers and capitalists to spare the time to break up an evil which makes the existence of colored interstate passengers an unbroken…
The Interstate Commerce Commission knows this and knows it well, yet it makes no determined and persistent attempt to compel railroads to give to their colored passengers accommodations equal to those which they furnish their white ones.
It is notorious that the accommodations furnished by the railroads in interstate commerce to their colored passengers are inferior to those which they furnish white passengers for the same fare.
Can it compel railroads to furnish him decent accommodations, which federal law provides shall be equal to those furnished to white passengers, and for which the colored passenger pays the same fare as the white one?
The colored passenger is, to be sure, an American citizen on paper, but what is it worth to him under the circumstances?
There is not a restaurant along the route where he may get a meal, and not a hotel which would give him a bed over night.
They get always the best accommodations for themselves and families, while he gets the worst.
What though he has paid for himself and wife or daughter the same fare which passengers of the favored class pay, he finds that there is a vast difference between what he gets and what they get for precisely the same money.
And it makes no difference how refined or educated or wealthy or infirm or aged a colored passenger may be, whether man, woman or child, he encounters the same unjust and unequal treatment at the hands of the railroads.