Historical voices

The fact that we make no show of our ability is held conclusive of our inability to make any, hence all the indifference and contempt with which incapacity is regarded fall upon us, and that too when we have had no means of disproving the…

We are unknown at any of the great exhibitions of the industry of our fellow-citizens, and being unknown we are unconsidered.

We must not only be able to black boots, but to make them.

We have orators, authors, and other professional men, but these reach only a certain class, and get respect for our race in certain select circles.

We must become mechanics; we must build as well as live in houses; we must make as well as use furniture; we must construct bridges as well as pass over them, before we can properly live or be respected by our fellow men.

The fact is (every day begins with the lesson, and ends with the lesson) that colored men must learn trades; must find new employments; new modes of usefulness to society, or that they must decay under the pressing wants to which their…

In times past we have been the hewers of wood and drawers of water for American society, and we once enjoyed a monopoly in menial employments, but this is so no longer.

Denied the means of learning useful trades we are pressed into the narrowest limits to obtain a livelihood.

At this moment I can more easily get my son into a lawyer’s office to study law than I can into a blacksmith’s shop to blow the bellows and to wield the sledge-hammer.

We have grown up with this republic, and I see nothing in her character, or even in the character of the American people, as yet which compels the belief that we must leave the United States.

The truth is, dear madam, we are here, and here we are likely to remain.

Then the love of country, the dread of isolation, the lack of adventurous spirit, and the thought of seeming to desert their “brethren in bonds,” are a powerful check upon all schemes of colonization, which look to the removal of the…

He does not make very great progress in civilization himself but he likes to be in the midst of it, and prefers to share its most galling evils, to encountering barbarism.

The black man (unlike the Indian) loves civilization.

I regret their election, but I cannot blame them; for with an equal amount of education and the hard lot which was theirs, I might follow their example....

It would seem that education and emigration go together with us, for as soon as a man rises amongst us, capable, by his genius and learning, to do us great service, just so soon he finds that he can serve himself better by going elsewhere.

Hence educated colored men, among the colored people, are at a very great discount.

White people will not employ them to the obvious embarrassment of their causes, and the blacks, taking their cue from the whites, have not sufficient confidence in their abilities to employ them.

At present we have not that cultivation amongst us; and therefore, we value in the preacher, strong lungs, rather than high learning.

Yet few comparatively, have acquired a classical education; and even this few have found themselves educated far above a living condition, there being no methods by which they could turn their learning to account.

These will doubtless be attained by us; but this will only be, when we have patiently and laboriously, and I may add successfully, mastered and passed through the intermediate gradations of agriculture and the mechanic arts.

High schools and colleges are excellent institutions, and will in due season be greatly subservient to our progress; but they are the result, as well as they are the demand of a point of progress, which we as a people have not yet attained.

To deliver them from this triple malady, is to improve and elevate them, by which I mean simply to put them on an equal footing with their white fellow countrymen in the sacred right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I am…

I assert then that poverty, ignorance, and degradation are the combined evils; or in other words, these constitute the social disease of the free colored people of the United States.