The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis Page A

women’s rights, she joined the Grimkés in denouncing racism and proposed specific measures to encourage whites to hire more blacks and to avoid segregation by sitting next to blacks in churches and other gatherings. Angelina viewed racism as a kind of “demon” that whites must struggle to “root out.” She told the Convention that “it is a solemn duty for every woman to pray to be delivered from such an unholy feeling and to act out the principles of Christian equality by associating with them [blacks] as if the color of the skin was of no more consequence than that of the hair, or the eyes.” Only such dedicated personal efforts could remove “one of the chief pillars of American slavery.” 18
    Turning now to the
Address to Free Colored Americans,
toward the end of the documentSarah Grimké pays passionate tribute to their beloved colored “Brethren and Sisters” for exposing the racism and criminality of the American Colonization Society and for probably preventing America from adding
    to her manifold transgressions against the descendants of Africa, the transcendent crime of banishing from her shores those whom she has deeply injured … You saw that the root of the evil was in our own land, and that expatriation of the best part of our colored population, so far from abolishing slavery, would render the condition of the enslaved tenfold more hopeless.…
    After quoting the eloquent resolutions proclaimed by Philadelphia’s blacks soon after the ACS was founded, Grimké makes clear that future generations should honor America’s free blacks for initiatingand making possible an abolitionist movement “on which heaven has smiled (for it could have success only from the great Master).” 19
    Endorsing the blacks’ view that “the Colonization Society originated in hatred to the free people of color,”Grimké then turns to the issue of white “supercilious prejudice” and “arrogant pretensions of unfounded superiority.” She acknowledges that many whites who have “a kind of sentimental desire for your welfare” are nevertheless “anxious to keep you as they term it, in your proper place.” Grimké even admits that the women can understand this denial to blacks of full social equality, since “most, if not all of us have had to combat these feelings, and such of us as have overcome them, have abundant cause to sing hallelujah to our God, and bless his holy name for our abolition principles; they have opened a source of heavenly joy in our bosoms, which we would not exchange for all the gold of Ophir.” 20
    This extraordinary candor, based on a millennial faith in “that blessed and glorious era, when the brother of low degree will rejoice in that he is exalted, and the brother of high degree in that he is made low,” encouraged Grimké to persuade black readers that the women were true friends and sisters who understood the dilemmas of race in antebellum America. In particular, they had learned that racism—“the unfounded calumny that the people of color are unfit for freedom”—had been “designed, on the part of slaveholders, as a salve for their consciences, and a plea for the continuation of slavery, and is used … for the diabolical purpose of shielding from merited infamy the system of American slavery.” 21
    Christian empathy also offered a possible solution to the great problem of reconciling slave dehumanization with black capability. The
Address
begins with an effort to persuade black readers that abolitionists grasp the very worst aspects of human bondage. “ ‘THE WORST IS NOT GENERALLY KNOWN,’ ” one Southerner is quoted as saying, after describing the institution’s well-knownphysical cruelties: “the nakedness of some [slaves], the hungry yearnings of others, the wailings and wo[e], the bloody cut of the keen lash, and the frightful scream that rends the very skies—and all this to gratify lust, pride, avarice, and other depraved feelings of the human