Now no race can pass through such a spiritual experience without being the better for it.
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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For great happiness like great suffering operates oftentimes as a moral purifier.
Before the overwhelming fact that they could no longer be bought and sold--that they could no longer be separated from their loved ones, these simple black folk fell in transports of gratitude before God, their mighty deliverer, their…
Cheerful they were by nature and hopeful, and gifted withal with an extraordinary amount of the milk of human kindness.
Service was natural and easy for them, and the cherishing of friends and foes in their need; but resentfulness and revenge moved them hardly at all during their long years of bondage.
The few slave insurrections or attempted slave insurrections were exceptions to the general tenor of their peaceable disposition and conduct, to the uniform and singular absence of ill-will, of a spirit of revenge in them as a race.
They had opportunity enough and provocation enough, God knows, to attack the property and the lives of the defenseless families of their hard task-masters during those four dreadful years of sectional strife.
This behavior of the slaves is the supreme example which American Christianity has yet given of the vital presence of the spirit of its divine founder in its midst.
No other act in its whole history approaches it in simple grandeur of forgiveness and service.
And it came literally out of the humble lives of a much oppressed and long suffering race.
This simple and kindly black folk issued then out of their two and a half centuries of bondage without malice toward the whites, without any of the violent emotions which lead to the commission of great crimes.
I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.