The blacks during these years were crushed between two irreconcilable forces, two antagonistic governments which were locked in a death grapple for possession of that section.
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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The first was supported by a few native and Northern whites and by the great body of the blacks, and the second was upheld by the great body of the native whites under the trained and ruthless leadership of the old master class, who would…
They were sinned against by their white leaders, who in the main used them to advance their personal and party interest, and who employed the positions they thus gained to steal the people's money, to enrich themselves at the expense of…
There were colored leaders who followed closely in the footsteps of the white leaders in perverting public trusts to corrupt ends, but the chief malefactors, the biggest scoundrels were members of the white race.
In these circumstances the blacks were the helpless victims of the misrule of their own leaders and of the organized lawlessness of the Southern whites.
In their need they asked for bread and were given a stone, they required sympathetic and wise leadership and were handed instead a bunch of scorpions.
They prayed for peace and for that happiness which goes with freedom, and there swept over them for six dreadful years a crime-storm which filled their nights and days, the season of their planting and the season of their reaping with…
They were able in these circumstances to get from the whites no lesson in obedience to law, in reverence for constituted authority, for as we have seen those selfsame whites were everywhere breaking the law and beating down and destroying…
Nor did they get any training in personal and civic righteousness from their own leaders of either race.
For those leaders initiated them promptly by the power of example into the great and flourishing American art and industry of graft.
This much however ought to be said in justice to the carpet-bag governments, namely, that bad as they were the lawlessness and violence of the Southern whites were a great deal worse.
I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.