Thus did the old master class perform their task without changing materially their old social system.
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.
gutenberg.org
Just about as much unpaid and involuntary labor could be got out of the first as out of the last.
The Negro as a serf was just about as valuable as an industrial asset to the great landlords and to the small ones too for that matter, as had been the Negro as a slave.
They emerged out of their reconstruction operation with a Negro serf system to take the place of their old slave system.
He is, whatever may be his legal status on paper, a proscribed man, subject to unmerited and unmeasured ignominies and injustices at the hands of his country, its society, its passions and prejudices.
A citizen without the ballot in America is in fact, whatever he may be in law, a de-citizenized man--exposed in consequence to the enmities, the jealousies, the insults and the violence of other citizens who are more fortunate in this…
The shepherd protects the sheep from the depredations of the wolves, and the ballot protects poverty against property, a weak race or class against the hate and aggressions of stronger ones within the same country.
The wolves will devour the sheep and the enfranchised class will prey on the disfranchised class.
A disfranchised class in an industrial republic like ours is as much at the mercy of an enfranchised class as is a flock of shepherdless sheep at the mercy of a pack of wolves.
The disfranchised Negro operates in many ways to depreciate the rights of the enfranchised Negro, and to draw him by the invisible threads of race kinship and of race prejudice toward if not quite within the zone of his own limitations and…
The mass of the disfranchised in those seven Southern States is so great that by the law of gravitation its very weight and number affect more or less adversely the status of the rest of the race in other states.
His political influence in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia is practically at the zero point.