Early Activism
He was born a free man of color, the son of a French colonist and the mulatto daughter of a planter, in the isolated South province of the colony. His mother, Marie Bagasse, was significantly wealthier and more educated than his father, Pierre Raymond, providing an economic incentive for their interracial marriage. Raimond was a slaveowner, as many free people of color from the South were. He owned over 100 slaves by the 1780s and was one of the wealthiest men in his racial class in the colony. But he is most famous for challenging the French government to reform racially discriminatory laws against free people of color in Saint-Domingue. In 1785 he moved to France to pursue this question in person at the French Colonial Ministry.
The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, in particular the publication of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, prompted Raimond to take his case before the National Constituent Assembly. Working with Vincent Ogé, Henri Grégoire and the Society of the Friends of the Blacks (which he was eventually elected as a leader of), Raimond succeeded in making the question of equal rights for free people of color into the leading colonial question before the National Assembly in 1790 and 1791.
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Famous quotes containing the word early:
“...to many a mother’s heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother’s kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)