To me, the wonder is, not that the freedmen have made so little progress, but, rather, that they have made so much; not that they have been standing still, but that they have been able to stand at all.
From his autobiography, challenging the common criticism of freedmen's lack of progress after emancipation.
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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.
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.
None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human understanding by letters.