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 condition is rapidly bringing them.
In his autobiography, Douglass argues for the necessity of Black Americans acquiring trades and new skills to ensure their economic survival and societal contribution.
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More from Frederick Douglass
They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.
The old slave quarter that had before sheltered them, and the fields that had yielded them corn, were now denied them.
A race which cannot save its earnings, which spends all it makes and goes in debt when it is sick, can never rise in the scale of civilization, no matter under what laws it may chance to be.