It is a notorious fact that the Southern whites as a class will not affiliate with any political organization on terms of equality with the blacks--that is, they may be educated to accept the Negro as a voter but nothing can induce them to…
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 will not encounter the ancient distrust, the inveterate hatred and contempt which the Republican Party arouses in those states, and which have paralyzed its usefulness and reduced it as a party of opposition to the zero point in…
For that party will be able to do in the South what the Republican Party has proved itself incapable of doing, namely, of attracting to itself Southern white men in sufficient numbers to make of it a formidable party of opposition in…
Although the situation is depressing, it is far from hopeless, I think, since the rise of the new Progressive party.
The year 1912 may be memorable among other things for witnessing the last appearance as a power in Republican National Conventions of the Southern Negro delegate.
Once upon a time, the race was represented in Congress, but today the tribe of the Negro Congressmen is extinct and has long been extinct.
Nothing else can possibly come of it in the future than has come of it in the past but evil to the South, arrested development and a backward civilization.
I can not repeat too often that such monstrous depression of a part of Southern labor is not less bad for the whites than it is for the blacks.
Wanting the ballot no amount of education and wealth in the South and of agitation in the North will of themselves be able to make Southern Governments responsive to the needs and the rights of the Negro as laborer and citizen.
There is no escape for the fly until its restless activities discover the right direction, and, to change the figure, there is none for the Negro out of his slough of despond until he can lay hold of the ballot.
It is as impossible for the Negro to escape from his blind alley without the ballot as it is for some foolish fly, imprisoned on a window pane, to find its way to freedom through it.
And this fate he can not escape so long as he remains a ballotless man--with no weapon of defense against the white man's race prejudice, which is regnant in his home and church and government and press and mills and shops and trades and…