African Americans themselves played key roles in arguing for their rights after emancipation. Shortly after freedom, they met throughout the nation to assert their rights and plead their cause. A typical instance occurred in South Carolina in 1865. In November of that year, over forty African Americans met in convention in Charleston to consider their common concerns and work to their common good. They considered a wide range of issues, from education for African-American children to the furthering of blacks’ economic interest. Of particular concern to the convention were the “black codes” passed by the South Carolina state legislature earlier in 1865. African Americans responded with alarm and concern to these developments, and organized to speak out against them. The convention crafted the following address, which was directed toward the white legislature that had passed the codes.

We have not come together in battle array to assume a boastful attitude and to talk loudly of high-sounding principles or unmeaning platforms, nor do we pretend to any great oldness; for we know your wealth and greatness, and our poverty and weakness; and although we feel keenly our wrongs, still we come together, we trust, in a spirit of meekness and of patriotic good-will to all the people of the State. . . .

Thus we would address you, not as enemies, but as friends and fellow-countrymen, who desire to dwell among you in peace, and whose destinies are interwoven, and linked with those of the American people, and hence must be fulfilled in this country. As descendants of a race feeble and long oppressed, we might with propriety appeal to a great and magnanimous people like Americans, for special favors and encouragement, on the principle that the strong should aid the weak, the learned should teach the unlearned.

But it is for no such purposes that we raise our voices to the people of South Carolina on this occasion. We ask for no special privileges or peculiar favors. We ask only for even-handed Justice, or for the removal of such positive obstructions and disabilities as past, and the recent Legislators have seen fit to throw in our way, and heap upon us.

Without any rational cause or provocation on our part, of which we are conscious, as a people, we, by the action of your Convention and Legislature, have been virtually, and with few exceptions excluded from, first, the rights of citizenship, which you cheerfully accord to strangers, but deny to us who have been born and reared in your midst, who were faithful while your greatest trials were upon you, and have done nothing since to merit your disapprobation.

We are denied the right of giving our testimony in like manner with that of our white fellow-citizens, in the courts of the State, by which our persons and property are subject to every species of violence, insult and fraud without redress.

We are also by the present laws, not only denied the right of citizenship, the inestimable right of voting for those who rule over us in the land of our birth, but by the so-called Black Code we are deprived the rights of the meanest profligate in the country – the right to engage in any legitimate business free from any restraints, save those which govern all other citizens of this State. . . .

We simply desire that we shall be recognized as men; that we have no obstructions placed in our way; that the same laws which govern white men shall direct colored men; that we have the right of trial by a jury of our peers, that schools be opened or established for our children; that we be permitted to acquire homesteads for ourselves and children; that we be dealt with as others, in equity and justice.

Source: “Address of the Colored State Convention to the People of the State of South Carolina,” Proceedings of the Colored People’s Convention of the State of South Carolina, in Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 1840-1865, Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker, eds., (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), II, 298-300.