Such is the fate which awaits the American Negro unless he can manage to get the right to vote in the South.
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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This is the inevitable fate of a ballotless race or class in an industrial democracy like ours.
For as the condition of the race grows worse and its citizenship deteriorates politically and civilly in the South, it will communicate to that part of it resident in the North something of its own sad lot, legal and industrial limitations…
He has a poorer chance in the South in spite of his increased educational opportunities and accomplishments, and he has a poorer chance in the North.
The colored American child has a poorer chance to rise in the scale of being to-day than had the colored American child of a generation ago.
The present outlook for that race is gloomy and depressing, and this gloom and depression are nation-wide.
We had better look at the situation of the Negro in the United States to-day without blinking the facts, see it clear and see it straight.
Non-interference is the ominous word which has cast its dark spell over the North and has turned its once warm and active sympathy into cold indifference and cruel apathy.
Since ejectment is impracticable as involving too huge a displacement of or amputation from the productive labor of the South, isolation remains the only alternative.
The whites of both sections make themselves believe, as a sort of salve to their conscience, I suppose, that the Negro in their midst is an alien race, is a non-assimilable element in the body politic, whose ejectment or isolation the…
Intermarriage of Northern men and women with Southern men and women helps tremendously the propagation of the Southern view and solution of the race problem.
Northern capital and enterprise, which are exploiting the South industrially, assimilate very readily the Southern view of the Negro, who must be kept at the bottom of the white man's labor system and civilization.