No vehemence of anti-slavery pressure, no shock of angry criticism coming from home was able to jostle him out of his fixed purpose to speak only when he was ready.
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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He came back proud that he was an American, prouder still that he was a man.
He saw the promised land of international fellowship and peace, and conquered in his own breast the evil genius of war.
He felt himself a citizen of an immense over-nation, of a vast world of federated hopes and interests.
He found home, a common destiny wherever he found common ideas and aspirations.
In strange and distant lands he found the human heart with its friendships, heroisms, beatitudes, the human intellect with its never ending movement and progress.
Beneath differences of language, governments, religion, race, color, he discerned the underlying human principle and passion, which make all races kin, all men brothers.
Grotius and Pothier and Mansfield and Blackstone and Marshall and Story were the shining heights to which he aspired.
He thirsted for the permanent, the ever living springs and principles of the law.
What was true of the Greek Demigod was likewise true of Charles Sumner.
How else could the great man be equal to his time and task?
At the bar of history and at the bar of God, I ask, Who is the ultimate criminal?