By some means I learned from these inquiries that “God, up in the sky,” made every body; and that he made white people to be masters and mistresses, and black people to be slaves.
Douglass recounts the common, religiously-based justification for slavery he encountered as a child, which claimed divine ordination for racial hierarchy.
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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.
Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.