On the recordJanuary 1, 1881
At this moment I can more easily get my son into a lawyer’s office to study law than I can into a blacksmith’s shop to blow the bellows and to wield the sledge-hammer.
Said by
Frederick Douglass
Source
gutenberg.orgAt this moment I can more easily get my son into a lawyer’s office to study law than I can into a blacksmith’s shop to blow the bellows and to wield the sledge-hammer.
Douglass provides a stark example of the racial barriers preventing Black individuals from accessing skilled trades, contrasting it with the relative ease of entering professional fields.
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More from Frederick Douglass
The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.
Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.
Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.