As an assertion of power by a people hitherto held in bitter contempt, as an emphatic and stinging protest against high-handed, greedy, and shameless injustice to the weak and defenceless, as a means of opening the blind eyes of oppressors to their folly and peril, the exodus has done valuable service.
From his autobiography, acknowledging the positive impacts and symbolic power of the Black exodus from the South.
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More from Frederick Douglass
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.
None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human understanding by letters.
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.