Inhuman as was this treatment, it was the natural result of the bitter resentment felt by the old master class, and in view of it, the wonder is, not that the colored people of the South have done so little in the way of acquiring a comfortable living, but that they live at all.
From his autobiography, concluding his argument about the post-emancipation struggles by marveling at the sheer survival of Black Americans despite immense hostility.
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More from Frederick Douglass
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.
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.