The performance of this task is the special mission of great men.
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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Accomplish thou my manhood and thyself," is the cry of humanity ringing forever in the soul of the reformer.
Douglas was a curious and grim example of the survival of viking instincts in the modern office seeker.
The insurgent moral sense of a mudsill and shopkeeping North had at last found voice and vent.
Against his granite-like character and convictions the insolence of the South flung itself in vain.
He must needs stand erect, inflexible, uncompromising, an image of Puritan intolerance and Puritan grandeur.
He could not bend the supple hinges of the knee to the slave power, for he had none to bend.
God made one American statesman without moral joints when he made Charles Sumner.
Never before in the Government had freedom touched so high a level.
That speech struck a new note and a new hour on the slavery agitation in America.
As it was in the beginning so it hath ever been, the world needs light.
Slavery must be dispossessed, its extension must be resisted.