August 3, 1857 "Frederick Douglass - Speaking At A Celebration Of West India Emancipation"

THE BLACKMAN WHO READS ALOUD

163 years ago Frederick Douglass spoke the absolute truth to a nation that was mired in the sins of institutional slavery. Fast forward to today the nation is mired in the sins caused by that sinful system. Will this nation finally make right what was horribly wrong with that system?​

“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows​ or with both”

Looking back as we look ahead. If the American Decendents of Slavery think that this nation will easily give in to the payment of reparations without a mass effort of civil disobedience or civil direct action confronting the forces who control the economic systems of this nation. Then they are paddling up torrid river crushed by relentless rain and wind without the benefit of a paddle. The battle for reparation will be more difficult than the battle for our civil and social rights. You see those rights came without a price for controlling institutions to pay. That is simply not the case as it relates to reparations. That battle will be hard-fought and it will require an undue amount of perseverance. Frederick Douglass said it clearly the is no struggle there is no progress. My only wish is that Mr. Douglass and Mr. Garnet had fought as hard for reparations as they fought for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Yet, way too many of our ancestors were victims of ignorance caused by the enslavement of 246 years to understand that they truly had economic rights that were sacred and that needed to be honored and not ignored.​