Such a man, the world says, may lie down until he has sense enough to stand up. For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others, or put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others. The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just. They began with the words, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” The entire speech appears below. However shortly after he began Douglass sounded a foretelling of the coming Civil War when he uttered two paragraphs that became the most quoted sentences of all of his public orations. Most of the address was a history of British efforts toward emancipation as well as a reminder of the crucial role of the West Indian slaves in that own freedom struggle. On August 3, 1857, Frederick Douglass delivered a “West India Emancipation” speech at Canandaigua, New York, on the twenty-third anniversary of the event.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |