For he, like Phillips, stood for his absolute equality before the law.
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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But he perceived that old things had passed away, and with them the need of the old instruments, and that what remained to be done for the black man required to be done with new means.
His services to his country and to the world were above all price, all money considerations.
It was felt that to him who had given so much to the world, the world should in his need make some substantial acknowledgement in return.
Indeed, the last written words of his, addressed to the public, were words in defence of the race to whose freedom he had devoted his life--words which, trumpet-tongued raised anew the rallying-cry of "Liberty and equal rights for each…
He believed in liberty, civil, religious, and commercial.
But what I object to among other things is that America, because of the crimes of individual Negroes or because of the suspected crimes of individual Negroes, draws an omnibus indictment against the moral character of the whole race, which…
Who cares to inquire into the origin of Negro crime, or into the causes which have contributed mightily to produce the Negro criminal?
The book of the Genesis of this man's crimes awaits to be written by an impartial and sympathetic seeker after truth.
The causes which have operated for fifty years to produce Negro criminals will some day, I trust, be traced without fear or bias to their source.
It is therefore perfectly safe to postulate that the greatest circumstance in the life of the Negro before emancipation was the institution of slavery.
I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow.