Some will be more successful than others, and poverty, in many cases, is the result of misfortune rather than of crime; but no race can afford to have all its members the victims of this misfortune, without being considered a worthless race.
From his autobiography, Douglass discusses the causes of poverty and its impact on the reputation of a racial group.
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Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.