“In humiliating the colored people of this country, this decision has humbled this nation.”
“No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow-men without at least finding the other end of it about his own neck.”
“Prejudice is a spirit infernal, against which enlightened men should wage perpetual war.”
“We want no black Ireland in America. We want no aggrieved class in America. Strong as we are without the Negro, we are stronger with him than without him.”
“Our legislators, our President, and the judges should have a care lest by forcing these people outside the law, they destroy that love of country, which in the day of trouble is needful to the nation’s defense.”
“Oh, for a Supreme Court of the United States which shall be as true to the claims of humanity as the Supreme Court formerly was to the demand of slavery.”
“What is a state in the absence of the people who compose it?”
“Land, air, and water do not discriminate. What does it matter to the colored citizen that a state may not insult him if the citizen of the state may? The decision is a concession to race pride, selfishness, and meanness, and will be received with joy by every upholder of caste in the land, and for this I deplore and denounce the decision.”
The few addresses just referred to are, in point of the subject-matter and the occasions that called them forth, the most important and able made by Frederick Douglass after emancipation. On each occasion there was a call for the supreme man of the Negro race and there were few, except a small group of colored people, to question his right to be so regarded.
Frederick Douglass, however, was something more than a “race leader”; he was always an eminent citizen of the republic, and as such his interests were not wholly rimmed about by the sorrows and aspirations of his own people. He was a careful student of his times and had an intelligent concern in all the great questions that arose and called for an opinion. It was quite in keeping with his cosmopolitan spirit that he should be opposed to the policy of our government in excluding the Chinese from American shores because, as he said, “I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.” His views on the question, which twenty-five years ago was an urgent one, are more fully expressed in the following extract from one of his addresses on the subject of the “Composite Nation”:—