There followed prompt repeal of the reactionary legislation hostile to the Negro, which had signalized the rise to power of the solid South and its one-party governments.
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 great constitutional revolution in the status of the Negro laid the basis for a political revolution in the old slave states also.
He was first raised to citizenship, and when that proved inadequate to meet the emergency, he was invested with the right to vote on equal terms with the whites.
When I say that they constitute the greatest obstacle to the freedom and advancement of the Negro, I mean, of course, the greatest obstacle outside of the Negro himself.
They signalized their first entrance upon the stage of national affairs by an attempt to create a serf class out of their former slaves.
They were then and they continue to be the greatest obstacle to the freedom and advancement of the Negro as an American citizen.
His freedom could not long survive such a combination of Southern race prejudice and passion and political power as constituted at that time the solid South and its one-party governments.
The extreme gravity of the situation as it affected the Negro lay in the political solidity of that section with its one-party governments in which he was denied a voice.
The return of the South into the newly restored Union stronger as a serf power than it had been as a slave power aroused the instant fear of the North and set Congress in motion to thwart such reappearance of that section into the arena of…
But in achieving this double success the old master class overreached itself.
For whereas five slaves had counted for them in the ante bellum apportionment of representatives as three freemen, five serfs would count in the post-bellum apportionment as five free men--a pretty large gain for the new power over the old…
Their old political power would not suffer any radical change in consequence of the abolition of slavery either.