It was the policy of the system to keep him both ignorant and degraded, the better and more safely to defraud him of his hard earnings; and this argument never staggered me.
Douglass reveals that slavery intentionally kept Black people ignorant and degraded to facilitate their exploitation, a fact he found undeniable.
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Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.
The vote of the colored man, formerly beaten down and stamped out by intimidation, is now revived, sought, and defended by powerful allies, and this from no transient sentiment of the moment, but from the permanent laws controlling the…
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.