Frederick Douglass: “Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.”

Everywhere in the south the colored man is learning to read.

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.

Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.