Frederick Douglass

I have long felt that too little attention has been given by our truest friends in this country to removing this stumbling block out of the way of the slave’s liberation.

It must be confessed that the most powerful argument now used by the southern slaveholder, and the one most soothing to his conscience, is that derived from the low condition of the free colored people of the north.

Now firmly believing, as I do, that there are skill, invention, power, industry, and real mechanical genius, among the colored people, which will bear favorable testimony for them, and which only need the means to develop them, I am…

I have during the last dozen years denied before the Americans that we are an inferior race; but this has been done by arguments based upon admitted principles rather than by the presentation of facts.

The fact that we make no show of our ability is held conclusive of our inability to make any, hence all the indifference and contempt with which incapacity is regarded fall upon us, and that too when we have had no means of disproving the…

We are unknown at any of the great exhibitions of the industry of our fellow-citizens, and being unknown we are unconsidered.

We must not only be able to black boots, but to make them.

We have orators, authors, and other professional men, but these reach only a certain class, and get respect for our race in certain select circles.

We must become mechanics; we must build as well as live in houses; we must make as well as use furniture; we must construct bridges as well as pass over them, before we can properly live or be respected by our fellow men.

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…

In times past we have been the hewers of wood and drawers of water for American society, and we once enjoyed a monopoly in menial employments, but this is so no longer.

Denied the means of learning useful trades we are pressed into the narrowest limits to obtain a livelihood.