For the first time in the history of our people, and in the history of the whole American people, we join in this high worship, and march conspicuously in the line of this time-honored custom.
Douglass marks the historic occasion as the first time African Americans are fully participating in a revered national custom.
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None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human understanding by letters.
The vote of the colored man, formerly beaten down and stamped out by intimidation, is now revived, sought, and defended by powerful allies, and this from no transient sentiment of the moment, but from the permanent laws controlling the…
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.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.