The Color Question

Many Americans often turn to Frederick Douglass’s July 5, 1852 speech on the occasion of July 4^th. This 250^th anniversary has been no different. But I want to disrupt a certain appropriation of Douglass’s voice. He is not a simple patriot. Read Douglass’s words on the eve of the centennial and feel the sting of his indictment of a nation turning its back on Black people and the promise of its ideals.

The Color Question: An Address Delivered in Washington, D.C., on July 5, 1875

(The Frederick Douglass Papers, https://frederickdouglasspapersproject.com/s/digitaledition/item/18187 )

FELLOW CITIZENS: I am not here to glorify the heroes of the American revolution. I simply avail myself of the occasion to say a few plain words of matters suggested by the facts of the present hour, and which immediately concern the colored people of our whole country.

The Revolution, of 1776, which resulted in the separation of this country from Great Britain, and its final independence, was a time that tried men’s souls. How grandly and gloriously that trial was borne we all know. The great men and the great events of that period are familiar to every schoolboy, white and black, in the land, and will ever so remain. They have been declaimed a thousand times at every fireside, upon every
hilltop and in every valley, and will be so declaimed again to-day.

If, however, any man should ask me what colored people have to do with the Fourth of July, my answer is ready. Colored people have had something to do with almost everything of vital importance in the life and progress of this great country. We have never forsaken the white man in any great emergency and never expect to forsake him. We have been with him in times of peace and in times of war, and at all times. We were with him in the darkest hours of the Revolution of 1776. We were with him in the war
for free trade and sailors’ rights in 1812. We were with him in 1861. We were with him at Bunker Hill and at Red Bank. We were with him on the land and with him on the water, and with him everywhere. A black man was in front of the first resistance made in State street, Boston, to British power and fell with his face toward the foe. But I will not dwell upon this topic. The late Wm. C. Nell, of Boston, the best historian the colored people have yet produced, has done ample justice to the black man in the Revolution. His book should be in the hands of every colored boy in the country.

THE RACE ON TRIAL.

The fathers of this Republic, as I have said, had their trial ninety-nine years ago. The colored citizens of this Republic are about to have their trial now. How we shall stand that trial, how we shall pass through it, how we shall come out of it, is to me a matter of great solemnity. The men of the Revolution went through the furnace and came out pure gold. Shall we, the colored people, present a similar example?

Let us look at the situation, and thoroughly understand all of its features, relations and bearings. As a people we have gained much during the last ten years. Fortune favored us with a liberal hand. It gave us a fair wind, if not a smooth sea, and by it we were driven on at a rate of speed that we had not known before and carried to a height of which we had never dreamed as possible to us. But the fact is—and it is one of which we should never lose sight—our progress and present position are due to causes
almost wholly outside of our own will and our own exertions. We did not make or control the issues of our destiny. We are the creatures of a conflict of social elements which we did but little to create. The white people of this country quarreled and came to blows, and it was our lot to be on the side of the victorious party.

THE CHANGE IN OUR CONDITION is mainly due to this fact.

Had the Union gone down in that mighty struggle, we should have gone down with it, and our condition to-day would have been even worse than before the quarrel began.

Now the thing to be considered to-day is this: Men cannot, ought not and will not quarrel and fight forever, even though outside parties may be benefited by such quarreling and fighting. This is true even of contentions among men of different races, and much more true where men are of the same race. The American people are essentially of the same race. They are of the same color. United by blood, by a common origin, by a common language, by a common literature, by a common glory, and by the same grand historic associations and achievements. So sure as the stars shine in the heavens, and the rivers run to the sea, so sure will the white people North and South abandon their quarrel and become friends. The whole American horizon is already fringed with the portents of this coming union. Boston, Lexington and Bunker Hill have already sent forth their silvery notes of peace and unity to the whole nation, and next year Philadelphia, the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, will lift to the sky its million voices in one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country—from gulf to lakes and from sea to sea.

THE COMING PEACE.

Now when this mighty quarrel has ceased, when all the asperities and resentments have gone as they are sure to go, when all the clouds that a few years ago lowered about our national house, shall be in the deep bosom of the ocean buried, when this great white race has renewed its vows of patriotism and flowed back into its accustomed channels, the question for us is: in what position will this stupendous reconciliation leave the colored people? What tendencies will spring out of it, and how will they affect us? If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring? Has justice so deep a hold upon the nation,
has reconstruction of the basis of liberty and equality become so strong that the rushing together of these mighty waves will not disturb its foundations? These questions, my friends, make me thoughtful. The signs of the times are not all in our favor. There are, even in the Republican party, indications of a disposition to get rid of us. Men are seeking new allies, and smiling in faces upon which they never smiled before since the war.

A disposition is seen to shake off the negro and accept the old master’s class. Out of the eight hundred thousand black voters of the country we have only had about twenty black clerks here in Washington, and these in the last few days have been thinned out and reduced. We have had a few representatives abroad and a few in Congress; the indications are that we shall have fewer by and bye. Ambitious candidates for the Presidency are already casting about to see if they cannot be elected in some way without the aid of the black vote. Well, they have the right to do all this, but the thing looks bad, and we at least are called upon to look the matter full in the face.

OUR SHELTER in the storms of the past has been Ulysses S. Grant. The question is as to who will shield us in the future. Well indeed it will be for us if one as true, just and able shall come after him.

One of the most unpleasant features of this situation for us is in our selves. We are a divided people, and have no men among us, I fear, whose counsel will be headed in the right direction. It has been our misfortune to be educated by two hundred years of slavery to respect white men and despise ourselves.

Now, just this is the thing we are to outgrow. We have got to find out that a people to be respected and powerful must have men among themselves and of themselves whom they must trust and respect. White men have their great men, and are respected in the scale of being because they have them. Ireland loves O’Connell, America loves Washington, Kentucky loves Clay, and Massachusetts loves Webster and Sumner, and our whole country believes in U. S. Grant. Now I believe that we, the colored
people, have men of our own color in whom we may well believe; and woe to us, woe to any people, who has no great men among its own people and of its own people.

AN ORGAN NEEDED.

Another bad feature of our situation is the fact that we have no grand organ which is peculiarly and distinctively our own. We are disparaged, vilified, slandered as a people, but as a people we are dumb, and have no press to answer and expose the injustice. The press of this city is marvelously magnanimous toward us, but we ought to have a press of our own, for we have a cause of our own. My soul creeps within me for a great spirit to rise up among us like that which animated William Lloyd Garrison forty years ago, which would consent to live upon a crust of bread and cup of water in a garret in Boston that he might send our wrongs on the wings of the press to the world. Never until we have and sustain such a press will the reproach of our people be wiped out. Oh, for a man, I say again, who will boldly climb high enough to hang our banner on the outer wall, so that it may be seen and read of all men, than the colored race is capable of living more than a life of absolute dependence, and can think and speak for itself.

There is another evil to be looked at and removed, and that is the swarm of white beggars that sweep the country in the name of the colored race. We must hereafter do our own begging, if any begging is done at all, on our own name. This day is a good day to send forth a declaration of independence on this point, repudiating all such beggars now and forever. I have prepared one such for the occasion, and in part it reads very much like THE GREAT DECLARATION which makes this day memorable.

Here it is: When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among their fellow men the independent and equal position to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain [un]alienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights various organizations are instituted among men, deriving their power from the consent of those in whose interests they have been professedly created; that whenever any such organization becomes destructive of these ends it is the right and the duty of such people to alter or
abolish it, and to institute new organizations, laying their foundations in such principles as to them shall seem most likely to promote their safety and welfare.

While we were the victims of slavery and had no voice or vote in shaping our destiny, we had good reason to appeal to THE BENEVOLENCE OF MANKIND.

To ask for help in that condition involved no disgrace. But all is changed now. We are no longer slaves, but freemen; no longer subjects, but citizens, and have a voice and vote with all other citizens. A new condition has brought new duties. A character which might pass without censure as a slave cannot so pass as a freeman. We must not beg men to do for us what we ought to do for ourselves. The prostrate form, the uncovered head, the cringing attitude, the bated breath, the suppliant, outstretched hand of beggary does not become an American freeman, and does not become us as a class, and we will not consent to be any longer represented in that position. No people can make desirable progress or have permanent welfare outside of their own independent and earnest efforts.

The burden of our demand upon the American people shall simply be justice and fair play. We utterly repudiate all invidious distinctions, whether in our favor or against us, and ask only for a fair field and no favor.

In our judgment we have been injured more than benefited by the efforts of so-called benevolent societies. While they may have helped a few, they have injured the many. They originate with and are organized by some good men, but they invariably fall into the hands of a peculiar class of men—men who combine shrewdness with religious zeal, and who, whether they sing, pray or preach, always “mean business.” They are ever on the look-out for just such associations as special colonization societies.

African civilization societies, African educational societies, Lincoln and Howard universities, and freedmen’s banks. They follow these with a scent as keen as the shark’s, which in old times followed the slave ship to eat the flesh of DEAD AND DYING NEGROES.

They are heels over head in love with the negro and want to do him ever so much good. These sharply pious men usually manage to slip into the money-boxes of these associations.

There is no keeping them out of the offices of honor and profit. A negro among them stands no chance. Money must be solicited in his name, but it will not do for him to know exactly what becomes of it. These holy men have studied the science of begging all their lives and they have attained the highest perfection. They manufacture circulars by the bushel and load down the mails with their appeals. They have got the names and addresses of all the giving men of the country. This begging class is mainly composed of broken-down preachers without pulpits, lawyers without clients, professors without chairs, editors without journals and the like men, who fail in everything but managing money given for the benefit of the negro.

In order to obtain revenue to carry on what they call their work (including, of course, the salaries which they piously vote themselves by the thousand) they draw the most distressing pictures of the black man’s character and condition. They keep the public mind constantly upon the poor, wretched negro, and thus damn the whole race to a large measure of contempt with a small degree of pity which is akin to contempt. Hence, we now and here denounce and repudiate all such shams and call upon the American people to do the same.

~