The Negro in the mass is a disfranchised man.
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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Andrew foresaw in 1866 as likely to come to pass in case of disfranchisement of the blacks, has been coming to pass ever since.
The condition which the great War Governor foresaw then fits remarkably well the Negro's actual condition to-day in certain sections of the nation.
Is it not because he is the ballotless victim in those states of one-party governments in which he is denied a voice?
But how explain this enormous contradiction between the rights which he is legally entitled to and those which he actually possesses?
He would in that event be surer of the thing which he seeks if the hole in the ground were a hole in some grave yard, for then the hole might be pulled in after him, when he would find rest at last--surcease from all the cruel perplexities…
The colored man who has the temerity to agitate for his rights in the South may find himself agitating speedily at the end of a rope, unless he more speedily finds some hole in the ground to give him the protection which Government refuses…
The white man enjoys a monopoly of the first and the Negro gets the lion's share of the second.
And yet both the mob and its victims are American citizens, entitled alike on paper to the law's protection and amenable alike to its penalties.
Nothing is done by the authorities to punish the mob or to protect their victims.
The mob burns Negroes and their property almost everywhere in the South with absolute impunity.
The Negro's Constitutional right to assemble to consider his wrongs is in reality too weak to resist the murderous violence of a Southern mob.