Because all these iniquitous distinctions and discriminations serve to teach colored men and women, however intelligent and wealthy and respectable, that their intelligence and wealth and respectability do not entitle them to equal…
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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At the moral retchings and manly revolt of the victim against this unequal treatment the South either sneers or else grows angry, because it affects to see in them the Negro's ambition for social equality, his secret desire to leave his…
And so down on the safety valve which free institutions provide, and regardless of the steam pressure within, the South has planted its brutal might with reckless and insolent disregard of consequences.
Everywhere the treatment of the Negro is the same, and everywhere the purpose of the South is plain.
Negro labor toils and produces without adequate reward or protection against the rapacity of Southern employers.
What it gets as its share bears no comparison with what the employer gets as his share.
The employer gets wealth while the Negro gets a bare subsistence.
But the great mass of Negro agricultural labor is exploited and plundered by the white employer class, and kept poor, because being poor they are esteemed less capable of giving the South trouble.
It is the only labor class in the South that is deprived of the right to vote, and so is rendered powerless to influence legislation and administration and the courts in its favor.
If the poverty of Negro labor renders it as a class less capable of giving the employer class trouble this poverty is at the same time a crime breeder and a huge crime breeder into the bargain.
This is a well-known Southern method for multiplying Negro criminals to meet the demands of Southern employers of cheap labor.
I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.