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“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Source: “West India Emancipation” address, Canandaigua, New York, 3 August 1857

Context Addressing a mainly Black crowd at a First of August celebration of British West Indian emancipation, he argued that the enslaved had to press for their own freedom.

Portrait of Frederick Douglass
Frederick DouglassUnited States · 1818–1895
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