The reader will see that the good old rule—“a man is to be held innocent until proved to be guilty”—does not hold good on the slave plantation.
Frederick Douglass: “The reader will see that the good old rule—“a man is to be held innocent until proved to be guilty”—does not hold good…”
Editor's note · Context
Douglass highlights in his autobiography how the fundamental legal principle of presumed innocence was completely disregarded under the system of slavery.
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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.
Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.
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…