The first act of the South after the war was most unfriendly to the blacks.
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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Southern slaves they had been but by the new labor legislation they were transformed into Southern serfs, chained to the soil by cunningly devised laws to regulate their labor and movement.
Force and violence toward the blacks were relied upon to put through this legislative and administrative program.
But when Congress intervened by its reconstruction measures to defeat the reactionary program of the South, there swept over that section a crime-storm of devastating fury.
Lawlessness and violence filled the land, and terror stalked abroad by day and night.
The Southern states had actually relapsed into barbarism.
During that period a new generation was conceived and born to the South by both races--a generation that was literally conceived in lawlessness and born into crime-producing conditions.
Lawlessness was its inheritance and the red splotch of violence its birthmark.
The period covered by this crime-storm was a bad way to begin the education of the Negroes in respect for law, in self control and in civilization.
For they found no law strong enough to protect them in their lives or property or freedom from the murderous attacks of that terrible secret organization.
Education in self-control, and in respect for constituted authority became impossible where the dominating feeling of the Negroes was one of terror.
I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.