A slaveholding community has a peculiar taste for ferreting out offenses against the slave system, justice there being more sensitive in its regard for the peculiar rights of this system, than for any other interest or institution.
From his autobiography, Douglass critiques how justice in slaveholding communities prioritizes the maintenance of slavery above all other concerns.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
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…
None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human understanding by letters.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.