Monday, May 22, 2006

JOURNEY HOME ~ SIGNS


JOURNEY HOME ~ SIGNS
Originally uploaded by Greatwork.

Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester, NY

"It is not the negro, educated or illiterate, intelligent or ignorant, who is on trial, or whose qualities are giving trouble to the nation." . . . "The real question, the all-commanding question, is whether American justice, American liberty, American civilization, American law, and American Christianity can be made to include and protect, alike and forever, all American citizens." . . . "It is whether this great nation shall conquer its prejudices, rise to the dignity of its professions, and proceed in the sublime course of truth and liberty marked out for itself during the late war, or shall swing back to its ancient moorings of slavery and barbarism. The trouble is that the colored people have still to contend against ’a fierce and formidable foe,’ the ghost of a by-gone, dead and buried institution.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Washington April 16, 1889, Bethel Literary and Historical Society,


"I have no doubt whatever of the future. I know there are times in the history of all reforms, when the future looks dark." . . . "I, for one, have gone through all this. I have had fifty years of it, and yet I have not lost either heart or hope." . . . "I have seen dark hours in my life, and I have seen the darkness gradually disappearing, and the light gradually increasing. One by one, I have seen obstacles removed, errors corrected, prejudices softened, proscriptions relinquished, and my people advancing in all the elements that make up the sum of general welfare. And I remember that God reigns in eternity, and that, whatever delays, disappointments, and discouragements may come, truth, justice, liberty, and humanity will ultimately prevail."
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
December 7 1889

teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=494

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