Once upon a time, the race was represented in Congress, but today the tribe of the Negro Congressmen is extinct and has long been extinct.
Archibald Henry Grimké: “Once upon a time, the race was represented in Congress, but today the tribe of the Negro Congressmen is extinct and has…”
Editor's note · Context
Grimké notes the historical absence of African American representation in Congress, emphasizing a significant loss for the community.
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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.
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…
White and black party following with white leadership is therefore the only feasible proposition, which stands any show of success as a party of opposition in that section under existing conditions.