It leaves the whole question of equal rights on the soil of the South open and still to be settled, with the moral influence of exodus against us; since it is a confession of the utter impracticability of equal rights and equal protection in any State where those rights may be struck down by violence.
In his autobiography, Douglass warns that the exodus movement would undermine the struggle for equal rights in the South by implicitly admitting their impossibility there.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
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.
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.