Peace between races is not to be secured by degrading one race and exalting another, by giving power to one race and withholding it from another, but by maintaining a state of equal justice between all classes.
From a delegation's reply to President Andrew Johnson, this asserts that true racial peace requires equal justice for all, not the degradation or exaltation of any single group.
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More from Frederick Douglass
The nation or people which shall comply with them will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will disappear altogether.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.