Since that time legislation hostile to the Negro has increased enormously in that section.
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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From the black seeds of their blunder black crops of race hatred and crime and misery have been reaped annually by the South along with those other crops of cotton and rice and sugar and tobacco, and sent like them to all parts of the…
The black seeds of this blunder of the old master class to lead their section in social justice and progress, the bitter years have ploughed deep into the life of both races.
But they themselves have not escaped the consequences of their egregious blunder, for a new class of whites have in turn wrested from them their leadership in Southern affairs.
They set in motion instead the forces and passions which have at length wrested the ballot from the Negro.
The failure of the old master class to seize the opportunity which had come to them a second time, following the collapse of the Rebellion, for progressive and constructive leadership of their section on the race question was an egregious…
The stream of reaction against the Negro set in strongly from that time and it has gathered volume each succeeding year since.
What was attempted then and failed would certainly fail today if it were possible to repeat the self same experiment.
This is true today whatever might have been possible in this regard immediately after the overthrow of the Southern Confederacy.
Social and political reconstruction in those states it seems now must come from within and by voluntary action not from without and by compulsory legislation.
They failed to moderate or abate Southern opinions, race prejudice and passions and were therefore doomed to fail as an experiment in social and political reconstruction.
They did not go deep enough and besides the whites refused to cooperate with the blacks to make them a success.