These are two vital things which the South needed then and which it needs to-day but which the old master class opposed then and which their successors oppose to-day.
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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That is what the whites did to educate the blacks during the most impressionable period of their new freedom in orderly government and in civilization.
They were again at the mercy of the old master class, who returned promptly to the execution of their interrupted program of inequality and injustice.
As the whites could not now reestablish constitutionally their old slave system, or directly their new serf system they proceeded to do the next best thing, that is to construct a caste system based on race and color.
Such a system, once firmly established, would fix the status of the blacks as a permanently inferior caste, and to that extent would render nugatory the three great amendments to the constitution.
For members of an inferior caste would by the force of circumstances, law, or no law, be deprived of certain rights civil and political enjoyed by members of the superior caste.
Citizenship of the one caste would not mean the same thing as citizenship of the other.
The lower caste could not possibly possess the same rights--constitution or no constitution--which the upper caste possessed.
Inequality became thus the chief corner stone of the new Southern edifice.
Under this society there grew up two moral standards and two legal standards for the government of the races.
For example what under such a system is bad for a black man to do to a member of the white race might not be regarded as bad at all if done by a white man to a member of the black race.
I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.