On every hand over against his paper rights as a citizen, the Negro faces facts which make his citizenship seem like a snare and a delusion.
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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Lay not down your weapons until honorable terms are obtained.
I am invited to occupy a broader field, and to engage in a higher enterprise; that field embraces the whole country--that enterprise is in behalf of the slave population.
To my apprehension, the subject of slavery involves interests of greater moment to our welfare as a republic, and demands a more prudent and minute investigation than any other which has come before the American people since the…
No body of men on the face of the earth deserve their charities, and prayers, and united assistance so much as the slaves of this country; and yet they are almost entirely neglected.
It is true many a cheek burns with shame in view of our national inconsistency, and many a heart bleeds for the miserable African.
It is true examples of disinterested benevolence and individual sacrifices are numerous, particularly in the Southern States; but no systematic, vigorous, and successful measures have been made to overthrow this fabric of oppression.
It is a gangrene preying upon our vitals--an earthquake rumbling under our feet--a mine accumulating material for a national catastrophe.
It should make this a day of fasting and prayer, not of boisterous merriment and idle pageantry--a day of great lamentation, not of congratulatory joy.
Our garb should be sack-cloth--our heads bowed in the dust--our supplications for the pardon and assistance of Heaven.
Sirs, I am not come to tell you that slavery is a curse, debasing in its effects, cruel in its operations, fatal in its continuance.
I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.