Archibald Henry Grimké

“ It is the fashion nowadays for every one with a stone in his hand to take a shy at the poor Negro on account of his sins of commission and omission. It is enough that some member of the race is caught flagrante delicto or merely on suspicion of evil doing to get himself into the public pillory and the rest of the colored people into our national rogues’ gallery, where they evoke instantly the loud lamentation of white saints and sinners alike, and the statistical and sophistical conclusions of a lot of fools and hypocrites. ”

“ Its caste system sits upon this safety valve of democracy. Much of the crime committed by oppressed peoples is in the nature of fullness of life seeking greater freedom, of pent up energies seeking an outlet, and much of the crime committed by oppressors is in the nature of attempts, perilous always, to sit upon this safety valve of popular governments, which is intended to relieve dangerous pressure within the steam-chest of human expansion and progress. But the South is determined to keep the Negro down however great may be his effort to rise. ”

“ The slave system owned the minds and bodies of its victims, who loved but had no legal title to their mates, or to the offspring who were born to them any more than did the cattle of the masters own their mates or the young which were born to them. The slaves were rated as so many human machines by the masters for the production of wealth for themselves and to add to their liberty and leisure and pursuit of happiness. ”

“ One need not be a prophet to foresee that out of all this injustice and inequality God’s avenging angel will come some day with sword, double-edged and deadly with disease and crime, to smite and to blight this land where white people having eyes refuse to see whither all their race injustice is leading, and ears but who are deaf to the prayer of Christ’s little ones crying for a man’s chance to get with others into the sun and to grow the free and beautiful life which God intended them to grow when first they came into the world, and that whether they are black or red or brown or yellow. ”

“ Such social injustice is as sure to provoke crime as stagnant water is to produce disease. Yet, in spite of this iniquitous caste system the leaven of democracy, of equality has found lodgment in the black man’s mind, and he craves the chance to become all that the white man has become and to do all that the white man does by virtue of his American freedom and citizenship. Nothing less than this is going to satisfy the blacks, the Southern caste system and appearances in spots among the blacks themselves, to the contrary notwithstanding. ”

“ But the great mass of Negro agricultural labor is exploited and plundered by the white employer class, and kept poor, because being poor they are esteemed less capable of giving the South trouble. It is the only labor class in the South that is deprived of the right to vote, and so is rendered powerless to influence legislation and administration and the courts in its favor. If the poverty of Negro labor renders it as a class less capable of giving the employer class trouble this poverty is at the same time a crime breeder and a huge crime breeder into the bargain. ”

“ But in their beautiful simplicity and kindness of heart and fidelity to the sacred and amazing trust reposed in them—the most sacred and amazing ever reposed in a slave race by a master race in the history of the world—they let their terrible opportunity for revenge pass them by and seized instead the noble one to feed and cherish the helpless women and children of masters who were fighting to rivet the chains of slavery on them and on their children forever. ”

“ In the murder of one black man, whether innocent or guilty, the South has, as in the case of Hamilton, made hundreds of white criminals, has tainted the blood of whole communities like Shreveport with the virus of lawlessness and crime. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But being landless and moneyless they were dependent for employment on the old master class. This put them at an immense economic disadvantage as a labor class on the threshold of their new life of freedom, and in the power of the old master class. The outlook for the new freedmen under these circumstances was not propitious. All the same these people, poor and ignorant and at the mercy of a ruthless employer class, were happy as children in the delight of their newfound freedom. ”

“ Thou hast made us white and white we mean to remain, Thy common fatherhood and the brotherhood of all these alien races to the contrary notwithstanding. We try to be humble Lord, but we have never yet succeeded in humbling the proud blood which Thou hast given us to the level of brotherhood with these strange dark peoples. ”

“ Citizenship of the one caste would not mean the same thing as citizenship of the other. The lower caste could not possibly possess the same rights—constitution or no constitution—which the upper caste possessed. Inequality became thus the chief corner stone of the new Southern edifice. Under this society there grew up two moral standards and two legal standards for the government of the races. For example what under such a system is bad for a black man to do to a member of the white race might not be regarded as bad at all if done by a white man to a member of the black race. ”

“ This much however ought to be said in justice to the carpet-bag governments, namely, that bad as they were the lawlessness and violence of the Southern whites were a great deal worse. For while some good can be placed to the credit of those governments nothing but bad can possibly be set down to the account of Southern lawlessness and violence. To the carpet-bag governments belongs the introduction into the South for the first time of the democratic principles of equality, and of the right of each child in the state, regardless of race or color, to an education at the hands of the state. ”

“ The human touch which makes, or which ought to make, all men brothers has been woefully wanting in the whites as a race towards the blacks as a race. There has been kindness and perhaps much kindness from individual white people to individual Colored people, but never from the mass of the whites to the mass of the blacks, but just the contrary. Instead of kindness of the one race to the other there has been increasing ill-will and active injustice as of one enemy to another. If crime there has been in consequence of this deplorable, this terrible fact who is the ultimate criminal? ”

“ Such a law makes colored women the safe quarry of white men, and nowhere in the South do law or public opinion impose upon them any deterrent punishment, moral or legal, for their crime, but quite the opposite. For such men do not lose standing in Southern society or the church or the state in consequence of their sin. In all this sexual inequality and iniquity the South has eyes but sees not and ears but hears not what is taking place everywhere in its midst. ”

“ Not so Lord, we have never accepted any man who is brown or black or yellow as really our brother, for we are white and Thou hast made us of different clay, of purer blood than all these millions of brown and black and yellow peoples. ”

“ Negro labor toils and produces without adequate reward or protection against the rapacity of Southern employers. What it gets as its share bears no comparison with what the employer gets as his share. The employer gets wealth while the Negro gets a bare subsistence. I am speaking of course broadly, for there are many Negroes who get more than a bare subsistence out of the products of their labor, and that in spite of bad and unequal laws and conditions. ”

“ Amid such evil conditions ignorance necessarily abounded and moral degradation deposited its slime, generation after generation, over the souls of masters and slaves alike. And in this moral mud there bred apace bestiality and cruelty, superstition and sensuality, tyranny and fear—the black brood of man’s inhumanity to man. ”

“ To say that individuals and races are the creatures of circumstances—that they are the products of their social heredity and environment—is to state a commonplace in the accepted doctrines of science to-day. It is therefore perfectly safe to postulate that the greatest circumstance in the life of the Negro before emancipation was the institution of slavery. ”

“ The problem of the South appears to be not how much education but how little it can possibly give the blacks in comparison with what it gives the whites. In all this educational business the South reasons that the blacks must be kept well in the rear of the whites, because they are to remain a permanently inferior class. That section is not anxious to reduce the illiteracy of its colored population and to raise the standard of their intelligence, for it thinks that an ignorant labor class is less difficult to manage than an intelligent one. ”

“ That is the spirit which the Negro encounters in the American church; that is the spirit which crushes him down and crowds him back whenever he tries to rise and advance. He and his are denied the White man’s chance to make the best of themselves and to get the most out of themselves. ”

“ On the other hand what happens to the black man who ventures to look upon a white woman with love or carnal desire, or who is even suspected of doing so? Ask Judge Lynch, ask the blind and murderous sex fury of white men, the red male rage of Southern mobs. Nevertheless black men cannot be made to see the difference between the lust of black men and the lust of white men, or to acknowledge the justice of such a distinction. ”

“ Hold the blacks responsible by all means for the crimes they commit, but hold the whites responsible also for creating social and legal conditions which lead directly to the growth of crime among both races. Race and color not efficiency and character are the basis of the Southern caste system, and such a system produces unavoidably ill-will, oppressions, and resentments between the races which lead directly or indirectly to the commission of crime. ”

“ He faces either in city or country the white man’s courts and police power and race prejudice and his industrial and residential exclusiveness and jealousies, but above all he faces the white man’s church with its undisguised color-phobia, with its virtual rejection of the brotherhood of man in respect to all races who happen not to be white. ”

“ If the mob failed to lynch the guilty and lynched instead an innocent man, it was so much the worse for the innocent man, not at all for the mob, however red their hands were with that innocent man’s blood. ”

“ I refer to the Southern policy of civil and political repression and oppression of its colored population in order to keep them within their caste of inferiority and subordination to the whites. Discontent under such oppressive conditions is sure to arise among the colored people, and this because of their growth and of the existence of the hard and fast lines within which this growth must go on. For this kind of discontent the South has no vent such as free institutions provide. ”

“ For all those who are black, regardless of what nature and education intend them to be are born into a fixed state of social and political inferiority, and all those who are white, regardless of what nature and education intend them to be are born into a fixed state of social and political superiority, and for no other or better reason than that those of the first class are black, and those of the second class are white. ”

“ Out of such kindly hearts, out of such deep and holy emotions crime does not come and it would not have come had there been no injection into the race soul of the Negro of new and bitter experiences of wrong at the hands of the whites. ”

“ At any rate the Negro laborer is convicted and a fine is imposed upon him, which he is unable to pay. Now comes the opportunity of the white employer, who happens to be conveniently in Court, to come to the rescue of the poor Negro. He pays the fine and the Negro contracts to pay him back by giving him nine months of his labor. ”

“ Care free and fear free, in spite of unfriendly conditions and a threatening outlook, they gave themselves up to such joy as God has rarely given in the history of the world to four millions of people. Now no race can pass through such a spiritual experience without being the better for it. For great happiness like great suffering operates oftentimes as a moral purifier. ”

“ Education in self-control, and in respect for constituted authority became impossible where the dominating feeling of the Negroes was one of terror. And as for civilization it was beaten down by the red hand of violence. The blacks during these years were crushed between two irreconcilable forces, two antagonistic governments which were locked in a death grapple for possession of that section. The one government was open and regular, while the other was secret and lawless. ”

“ In this same Shreveport there were five colored men lynched in ten days and eight in a year, and one white woman testified at an investigation conducted by the attorney general’s office that she rode in an automobile crowded with men eighteen miles to see an old colored man burned at the stake! Like begets like, and crime crime, and there is no help for it. ”

“ He is to be kept down by brute force if he cannot be kept down in any other way, below the social and industrial and political level of the lowest and most worthless of the whites, because he is black and because they are white. ”

“ Such is the story of what the whites did to educate the blacks at the most impressionable period of their freedom in democracy, in orderly government and Christian civilization. And it is the story of that education during the last fifty years. There was never kindness to the blacks and sympathy from the Southern whites as of men to men. ”