On the recordJanuary 1, 1881
Though they were not slaves they were not yet quite free.
Said by
Frederick Douglass
Source
gutenberg.orgThough they were not slaves they were not yet quite free.
Douglass describes the paradoxical state of formerly enslaved people after emancipation, highlighting that legal freedom did not equate to full liberty.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.
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.
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…