Such social injustice is as sure to provoke crime as stagnant water is to produce disease.
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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Yet, in spite of this iniquitous caste system the leaven of democracy, of equality has found lodgment in the black man's mind, and he craves the chance to become all that the white man has become and to do all that the white man does by…
Nothing less than this is going to satisfy the blacks, the Southern caste system and appearances in spots among the blacks themselves, to the contrary notwithstanding.
I refer to the Southern policy of civil and political repression and oppression of its colored population in order to keep them within their caste of inferiority and subordination to the whites.
Discontent under such oppressive conditions is sure to arise among the colored people, and this because of their growth and of the existence of the hard and fast lines within which this growth must go on.
But the South is determined to keep the Negro down however great may be his effort to rise.
He is to be kept down by brute force if he cannot be kept down in any other way, below the social and industrial and political level of the lowest and most worthless of the whites, because he is black and because they are white.
This is the meaning of the Southern movement for segregating the races, of its jim-crow car laws and waiting-rooms.
This is the meaning of the Negro's exclusion from dining-cars and from restaurants along the line of Southern railroads.
He pays the same fare as the white passenger but he is given inferior accommodations and in many instances these accommodations are monstrously unequal and inferior.
He is black and therefore the same law which protects the white passenger against bad accommodations does not apply to him.
I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.