On every hand over against his paper rights as a citizen, the Negro faces facts which make his citizenship seem like a snare and a delusion.
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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This sounds amazing and it is amazing because it fits the Negro's case so exactly, because it is an accurate description of his condition as an agricultural laborer in many of the Southern states.
The South does not regard the Negro laborer then as undesirable but quite the contrary--only it wants to retain possession of it on its own terms, not on those advantageous to that labor.
This sounds singular in this land of the free and it is singular, for of no other class of American labor could it be said that its right to migrate from one state to another is actually obstructed by law and would be resisted by force.
Negro labor could not in any considerable numbers leave the South voluntarily because Southern capital and landed interests would not let it, would resist by force if found necessary its migration to other parts.
On the contrary has he not been patient and peaceful and cheerful under wrongs which would have made any other class of Americans sullen and dangerous and lawless?
Without Negro labor how much less cotton would the South produce annually, or sugar or rice or tobacco, think you?
Nor has he failed as a laborer, for he does annually his share of the work of the Nation, and in the production of its wealth.
Certainly not if past services to the country of the greatest value are any proof to the contrary.
Nevertheless no alien is he any more than are the whites themselves, if duration of occupancy of the soil has anything to do with making a race native and to the manner born.
But perhaps it is because the whites choose to make believe that he is an alien, which comes nearer the real reason.
Why does the Negro occupy this very anomalous position in his country?