The Southern propaganda against the Negro is advancing apace in the North by many dark and devious ways and by many subtle and potent means.
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 is wholly incapable of attracting Southern whites in sufficient numbers to raise it to the rank of a party of opposition, or to give to it the barest chance of achieving success at the polls.
It is powerless to dissolve the solid South and to restore to that section bi-party in place of one-party governments.
It is dead and I do not believe that its corpse can ever be galvanized into life again.
It seems probable that reduction of representation of its Southern wing in its National Conventions will occupy a prominent place on the program of Republican reorganization within the next four years.
But whatever has been the motive of that party for its policy of inactivity and indecision on this question heretofore, there are not wanting signs of a change of that policy presently into one of activity and decision.
Since 1884, there has been an increasing inclination among Republican leaders to reduce the representation of the party's Southern wing in National Conventions to a number proportioned to the size of its vote on election day.
The South, as we have seen, has succeeded most thoroughly in depriving the Negro in its midst of any voice in its governments and it has shut him out of state offices, and now thanks to President Taft, has at last succeeded in depriving…
In consequence of the consistent enforcement of this rule colored federal office-holders in the South are like angels' visits to that section, few and far between.
For he it is who laid down the rule at the beginning of his administration, and has observed it strictly for four years, that it would be unwise to make appointments of colored men to federal office in the South whenever the South objects…
On the contrary non-interference is the ominous word which now gags the Northern people and press, its pulpit and platform and hobbles the action of the general government.
For they gave up long ago trying to solve the problem how to make a vote in that section count as much as a vote in the solid South.