Historical voices

The battle against popular prejudice will have been fought and won, and in common with all other races and colors, we shall have an equal chance in the race of life.

If the time shall ever come when we shall possess in the colored people of the United States, a class of men noted for enterprise, industry, economy, and success, we shall no longer have any trouble in the matter of civil and political…

Every dollar you lay up, represents one day’s independence, one day of rest and security in the future.

This part of our destiny is in our own hands.

A poverty-stricken class will be an ignorant and despised class, and no amount of sentiment can make it otherwise.

With money and property comes the means of knowledge and power.

Pardon me, therefore, for urging upon you, my people, the importance of saving your earnings; of denying yourselves in the present, that you may have something in the future, of consuming less for yourselves that your children may have a…

Some will be more successful than others, and poverty, in many cases, is the result of misfortune rather than of crime; but no race can afford to have all its members the victims of this misfortune, without being considered a worthless…

Put us in Kansas or in Africa, and until we learn to save more than we spend, we are sure to sink and perish.

A race which cannot save its earnings, which spends all it makes and goes in debt when it is sick, can never rise in the scale of civilization, no matter under what laws it may chance to be.

An exceptionally poor and dependent people will be despised by the opulent and despise themselves.

It is this, neither we, nor any other people, will ever be respected till we respect ourselves, and we will never respect ourselves till we have the means to live respectably.

The hardships and dangers involved in the struggle give strength and toughness to the character, and enable it to stand firm in storm as well as in sunshine.

No people to whom liberty is given, can hold it as firmly and wear it as grandly as those who wrench their liberty from the iron hand of the tyrant.

Greatness does not come to any people on flowery beds of ease.

I will not listen, myself, and I would not have you listen to the nonsense, that no people can succeed in life among a people by whom they have been despised and oppressed.

Let us then, wherever we are, whether at the North or at the South, resolutely struggle on in the belief that there is a better day coming, and that we by patience, industry, uprightness, and economy may hasten that better day.

The fact that we have endured wrongs and hardships, which would have destroyed any other race, and have increased in numbers and public consideration, ought to strengthen our faith in ourselves and our future.

Taking all the circumstances into consideration, the colored people have no reason to despair.

Inhuman as was this treatment, it was the natural result of the bitter resentment felt by the old master class, and in view of it, the wonder is, not that the colored people of the South have done so little in the way of acquiring a…

The old slave quarter that had before sheltered them, and the fields that had yielded them corn, were now denied them.

Old and young, sick and well, were turned loose to the open sky, naked to their enemies.

They were sent away empty-handed, without money, without friends, and without a foot of land to stand upon.

It was born in the tempest and whirlwind of war, and has lived in a storm of violence and blood.