Open Letter to President McKinley by Colored People of Massachusetts

“ Not as Suppliants do we Present Our Claims,
but as American Citizens. ”
“ Not as Suppliants do we Present Our Claims,
but as American Citizens. ”
The Colored People of Boston and vicinity, through the Colored National League, at a mass meeting held in the Charles Street Church, Tuesday evening, October 3d, 1899, addressed an Open Letter to President McKinley.
The reading of the letter by Mr. Archibald H. Grimké, Chairman of the Committee, was listened to with marked attention and interest, and at the conclusion of its reading the letter was adopted by the meeting with significant unanimity.
The letter was forwarded to President McKinley, signed by the officers of the meeting and others.
Boston, Mass., October 3, 1899.
Hon. William McKinley,
President of the United States ,
Sir:—
We, colored people of Massachusetts in mass meeting assembled to consider our oppressions and the state of the country relative to the same, have resolved to address ourselves to you in an open letter, notwithstanding your extraordinary, your incomprehensible silence on the subject of our wrongs in your annual and other messages to Congress, as in your public utterances to the country at large. We address ourselves to you, sir, not as suppliants, but as of right, as American citizens, whose servant you are, and to whom you are bound to listen, and for whom you are equally bound to speak, and upon occasion to act, as for any other body of your fellow-countrymen in like circumstances. We ask nothing for ourselves at your hands, as chief magistrate of the republic, to which all American citizens are not entitled. We ask for the enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness equally with other men. We ask for the free and full exercise of all the rights of American freemen, guaranteed to us by the Constitution and laws of the Union, which you were solemnly sworn to obey and execute. We ask you for what belongs to us by the high sanction of Constitution and law, and the Democratic genius of our institutions and civilization. These rights are everywhere throughout the South denied to us, violently wrested from us by mobs, by lawless legislatures, and nullifying conventions, combinations, and conspiracies, openly, defiantly, under your eyes, in your constructive and actual presence. And we demand, which is a part of our rights, protection, security in our life, our liberty, and in the pursuit of our individual and social happiness under a government, which we are bound to defend in war, and which is equally bound to furnish us in peace protection, at home and abroad.