Frederick Douglass: “We leave social equality where it should be left, with each individual man and woman.”

They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.

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…

Still another ground of hope I find in the fact that colored men are strong in their gratitude to benefactors, and firm in their political convictions.

We are no longer four millions of slaves, but six millions of freemen.