The proposition to disfranchise the coloured voter of the South in order to solve the race problem, I therefore denounce as a false and cowardly proposition, utterly unworthy of an honest and grateful nation.
Douglass denounces the idea of disenfranchising Black voters as cowardly and unworthy of a just nation.
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More from Frederick Douglass
The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.
But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.
This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.