Is not the South sowing into the souls of both races the seeds of sin and violence, and shall it not then reap its full crop of crime and misery, the wild and anarchic harvest of the whirlwind?
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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For wherever he goes he carries the marks of his race with him, and that is the essence of his offense in America.
The American church is saying with the spirit of the unseeing Peter of old, "Not so Lord, we have never accepted any man who is brown or black or yellow as really our brother, for we are white and Thou hast made us of different clay, of…
Thou hast made us white and white we mean to remain, Thy common fatherhood and the brotherhood of all these alien races to the contrary notwithstanding.
We try to be humble Lord, but we have never yet succeeded in humbling the proud blood which Thou hast given us to the level of brotherhood with these strange dark peoples.
That is the spirit which the Negro encounters in the American church; that is the spirit which crushes him down and crowds him back whenever he tries to rise and advance.
He and his are denied the White man's chance to make the best of themselves and to get the most out of themselves.
The wonder is that the colored criminal class is not larger and more dangerous to person and property.
The problem of the South appears to be not how much education but how little it can possibly give the blacks in comparison with what it gives the whites.
In all this educational business the South reasons that the blacks must be kept well in the rear of the whites, because they are to remain a permanently inferior class.
That section is not anxious to reduce the illiteracy of its colored population and to raise the standard of their intelligence, for it thinks that an ignorant labor class is less difficult to manage than an intelligent one.
I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.