He had the sagacity to perceive that equality before the law could alone avert a revival under a new name of the old slave power and system.
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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It would reappear as Negro serfdom unless placed in the way of utter extinction.
Sumner understand this truth, that wrong has a fatal gift of metamorphosis, its ability to change its form without losing its identity.
Equality before the law is, in fact, the only adequate defense which poverty has against property in modern civilized society.
Negro citizenship and suffrage he championed not to save the political power of his party and section, but as a duty which the republic owes to the weakest of her children because of their weakness.
It was freedom alone that he was solicitious of establishing, the supremacy of democratic ideas and institutions in the new-born nation.
No party considerations entered into his straightforward purpose.
His answer he framed on the simple basis of right.
Emancipation and colored troops were the powder and ball which Providence had laid by the side of our guns.
It was rather a holy crusade against wrong and for the supremacy and perpetuity of liberty in America.
Not to fight then he saw was but to provoke more horrible woes, to prevent which the man of Peace preached war, unrelenting war.
And yet, he was no fanatical visionary, Utopian dreamer, but a practical moralist in the domain of politics.