He saw that they were not essentially unlike other races--that there was nothing morally or intellectually peculiar about them, and that the evil or the good which they manifested was the common property of mankind in similar circumstances.
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 myself, I had rather rob any bank to an indefinite amount than kidnap a fellow-being, or hold him in bondage; the sin would be less injurious to society, and less sinful in the sight of God.
I have always supposed that its spirit was directly opposed to everything in the shape of fraud and oppression.
Pray, sir, is it a careful desire to fulfill the Scriptures, or to make money, that induces you to hold your fellow-men in bondage?
I cannot conceive why a black man may not as reasonably object to my color, as I to his.
My friends were prodigal of pity, but of nothing else.
When he had ceased speaking I said to those around me: 'That is a providential man; he is a prophet; he will shake our nation to its center, but he will shake slavery out of it.
Then you had better let all your irons burn than neglect your duty to the slave.
He could not hold his peace; his message he was compelled to deliver in the ears of the nation whether its leaders would hear or forbear.
Perhaps the common people would hearken to what the wise and powerful had rejected.
At any rate they should hear what was resting upon his soul with the weight of a great woe, the force of a supreme command.
I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.