Such a law makes colored women the safe quarry of white men, and nowhere in the South do law or public opinion impose upon them any deterrent punishment, moral or legal, for their crime, but quite the opposite.
Grimké critiques the legal and societal protections that allow white men to exploit colored women in the South.
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O Freedom! how are ye still born In the rude stable, in the manger nursed; What humble hands unbar those gates of morn Through which the splendors of the New Day burst.
It would reappear as Negro serfdom unless placed in the way of utter extinction.
I have always supposed that its spirit was directly opposed to everything in the shape of fraud and oppression.
And in this moral mud there bred apace bestiality and cruelty, superstition and sensuality, tyranny and fear--the black brood of man's inhumanity to man.