Frederick Douglass

To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.

In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.

Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.

They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.

Still another ground of hope I find in the fact that colored men are strong in their gratitude to benefactors, and firm in their political convictions.

None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human understanding by letters.

Everywhere in the south the colored man is learning to read.

Another ground of hope for our race is in the progress of education.

We are no longer four millions of slaves, but six millions of freemen.

No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.

The nation or people which shall comply with them will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will disappear altogether.