I have shown that during all the years of reconstruction, when he was being murdered at Hamburg, Yazoo, New Orleans, Copiah and elsewhere, he was never accused at that time of the crime now charged against him.
Douglass notes that during the Reconstruction era, Black individuals were not accused of crimes despite widespread violence against them.
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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.
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…
The nation or people which shall comply with them will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will disappear altogether.