He has a standing in the supreme law of the land-- in the Constitution of the United States--not to be changed or affected by any conjunction of circumstances likely to occur in the immediate or remote future.
From his autobiography, asserting the constitutional standing of African Americans after the Civil War, on the permanence of their rights.
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.
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…
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.