On the record
There is, to be sure, no law forbidding the selling of land to the colored people, but there is an understanding which has the full effect of law.
Said by
Frederick Douglass
Source
gutenberg.orgThere is, to be sure, no law forbidding the selling of land to the colored people, but there is an understanding which has the full effect of law.
Douglass notes the informal agreements that effectively prevent land sales to African Americans, despite the absence of legal prohibitions.
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Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.
The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.
But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.
We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.