Not certainly from the North, from the Republican Party.
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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There will be no improvement in that situation to any material extent until he gets the ballot, a voice in the government of those states.
Such is the deplorable situation of the Negro in the South at the close of the first fifty years of his freedom.
They would begin to get for their children more and better schools and longer school terms, and for their teachers more equal pay as compared with that received by white teachers for similar service.
The end of all those terrible systems which exploit and rob and oppress them and keep them poor and ignorant and weak, the sad victims of race prejudice and greed and cruelty, would grow nearer to the perfect day of the race's final…
Legislatures and administrative officers would begin to make some response to their claim for social justice and political rights, and the courts would begin also to lend a more attentive ear to their rights of person and property.
But their hard lot as men would improve, their worth as citizens, their social and industrial value to their community, state and country would rise correspondingly in the scale of being and character, with the increased freedom…
Things would undoubtedly be different for the colored people in those states had they though slight, some positive and appreciable influence at the polls.
Such social injustice and political inequality as exist between the races in the South are bad for the whites as they are bad for the blacks--are very bad for their collective interests and for the National interests of the great…
While they have done this they have managed at the same time to leave the ballot in the hands of every white man.
The states which have thus revised their constitutions have thereby effected the practical disfranchisement of their entire colored population.
Its old reconstructed State Constitutions have been one by one revised most favorably to the whites and most unfavorably and unjustly for the blacks.