If crime there has been in consequence of this deplorable, this terrible fact who is the ultimate criminal?
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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Instead of kindness of the one race to the other there has been increasing ill-will and active injustice as of one enemy to another.
There has been kindness and perhaps much kindness from individual white people to individual Colored people, but never from the mass of the whites to the mass of the blacks, but just the contrary.
The human touch which makes, or which ought to make, all men brothers has been woefully wanting in the whites as a race towards the blacks as a race.
Who then in these circumstances are the ultimate criminal, those who are unwillingly poor and ignorant, or those who make and keep them so by bad and unequal laws, by bad and unequal treatment?
Our criminal classes do many things which the law forbids to be done not because they are of one race or color or of another race or color, but mainly because they are poor and ignorant.
They are the parents of much of the crime committed by the Negroes just as they are the parents of much of the crime committed by the whites.
But ignorance is a breeder of crime just as poverty is.
Therefore the South has little love or use for an intelligent labor class, but desires above all things an ignorant one, and does what in it lies to hinder educational progress among its colored population.
Ignorance is indeed apt to be stolid and submissive under circumstances in which intelligence becomes restless and discontented.
That section is not anxious to reduce the illiteracy of its colored population and to raise the standard of their intelligence, for it thinks that an ignorant labor class is less difficult to manage than an intelligent one.
In all this educational business the South reasons that the blacks must be kept well in the rear of the whites, because they are to remain a permanently inferior class.