Theirs was a moral warfare, the grappling of truth with error, of the power of love with the inhumanities of the nation.
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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It seemed to him then that it was no longer a mere struggle for the freedom of the slave, but for the right of free speech and free discussion as well.
The great riot gave those young men their first summons to enter the service of freedom.
This is a fair specimen of the indomitable, indefatigable spirit which was born of the attempt to put Abolitionism down by lawlessness and violence.
Here there was an apparent defeat for the Abolitionists, but the consequences which followed the outrage proved it a blessing in disguise.
If anti-slavery meetings made converts by tens, anti-slavery mobs made them by hundreds.
The individual suffers but the cause goes forward.
The attempt to suppress the Abolitionists was a failure.
It is not regard for the forms of religion but for the spirit, which is essential to righteousness.
Yet, what is slavery but a breaking and treading down of the whole ten, what but a vast system of adultery, robbery, and murder, the daily and yearly infraction on an appalling scale not alone of the spirit but of the letter of the…
His doctrine is that every day is a Sabbath, and every man his own minister.
I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.