Many of their number are in the most affluent circumstances, and distinguished for their refinement, enterprise, and talents.
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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They have flourishing churches, supplied by pastors of their own color, in various parts of the land, embracing a large body of the truly excellent of the earth.
I feel no uneasiness either in regard to my fate or to the success of the cause of Abolition.
Nothing could separate him from his duty to them, neither dangers present nor persecutions to come.
The necessity of doing, doing, and yet ever doing for the slave was plainly pressing deep like thorns into his thoughts.
It was from beginning to end an example of love to God and love to men, of fearless scorn of injustice and fearless devotion to liberty.
Not one of those three score souls who made up the convention, who did not take his life in his hand by reason of the act.
It was not the love of fame surely which brought them over so many hundreds of miles, which made so many of them endure real physical privation, which drew all by a common, an irresistible impulse to congregate for an unpopular purpose…
It was the divine pang and pity of it which collected from the East and from the West this remarkable body of reformers.
The effects, so electrical and impressive, which followed the reading of the declaration were not disproportioned to its merits, for it was an instrument of singular power, wisdom, and eloquence.
Indeed, to this day, more than half a century after it was written it still has virtue to quicken the breath and stir the pulses of a sympathetic reader out of their normal time.
I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.