Frederick Douglass

These will doubtless be attained by us; but this will only be, when we have patiently and laboriously, and I may add successfully, mastered and passed through the intermediate gradations of agriculture and the mechanic arts.

High schools and colleges are excellent institutions, and will in due season be greatly subservient to our progress; but they are the result, as well as they are the demand of a point of progress, which we as a people have not yet attained.

To deliver them from this triple malady, is to improve and elevate them, by which I mean simply to put them on an equal footing with their white fellow countrymen in the sacred right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” I am…

I assert then that poverty, ignorance, and degradation are the combined evils; or in other words, these constitute the social disease of the free colored people of the United States.

We needed more to learn how to make a good living than to learn Latin and Greek.

Their poverty kept them ignorant and their ignorance kept them degraded.

They were shut out from all lucrative employments and compelled to be merely barbers, waiters, coachmen and the like at wages so low that they could lay up little or nothing.

I argued that the want of money was the root of all evil to the colored people.

What I thought of as best was rather a series of workshops, where colored people could learn some of the handicrafts, learn to work in iron, wood, and leather, and where a plain English education could also be taught.

It combined all the power and pathos of preceding publications of the kind, and was hailed by many as an inspired production.

No book on the subject of slavery had so generally and favorably touched the American heart.

Nothing could have better suited the moral and humane requirements of the hour.