Frederick Douglass: “The day we celebrate is preëminently the colored man’s day.”

To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.

None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human understanding by letters.

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

The nation or people which shall comply with them will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will disappear altogether.