The speech urges humility and submission as key to the advancement of black Americans. The narrator recalls delivering the class speech at his high school graduation.
His grandfather's words haunt him, for the old man deemed such meekness to be treachery. He counseled the narrator's father to undermine the whites with "yeses" and "grins" and advised his family to "agree 'em to death and destruction." Now the narrator too lives meekly he too receives praise from the white members of his town. On his deathbed, however, he spoke bitterly to the narrator's father, comparing the lives of black Americans to warfare and noting that he himself felt like a traitor. The narrator's grandfather lived a meek and quiet life after being freed. The narrator speaks of his grandparents, freed slaves who, after the Civil War, believed that they were separate but equal-that they had achieved equality with whites despite segregation.
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