In their need they asked for bread and were given a stone, they required sympathetic and wise leadership and were handed instead a bunch of scorpions.
Archibald Henry Grimké: “In their need they asked for bread and were given a stone, they required sympathetic and wise leadership and were handed…”
Editor's note · Context
Grimké uses a metaphor to illustrate the betrayal African Americans faced in their search for leadership and support.
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And yet if relief is ever to come to the Negro in the South, it must come to him by the way of an opposition party, which will put an end to the political solidity of that section by introducing into it bi-party in place of its one-party…
And politics is business, is the big business is it not, or ought it not to be the big business of all self governing peoples, who would maintain justice and freedom for themselves and transmit them unimpaired to their posterity?
There must be added to them this something else, this one thing needful to render them effective to save the blacks from the evil consequences of their race ignorance, and the whites from the evil consequences of their race prejudice.
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