On September 29, 1865, numerous African American men from the eastern section of North Carolina assembled at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Raleigh. The mainstays of the convention wanted blacks in North Carolina to have the constitutional rights to be able to testify in court, vote in elections, and serve on a jury. Several delegates made speeches including Horace Greeley. In his speech to the convention, Greeley proclaimed that the delegates needed to remain “hopeful, patient, peaceful, and diligent, to respect themselves, and to stay in North Carolina, a noble state, with her resources mainly undeveloped’”