Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is in an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
ATTRIBUTION:
Frederick Douglass (c.1817–1895), U.S. abolitionist. Speech, April 1886, Washington, DC. The Frederick Douglass Papers, ed. John W. Blassingame (1982).
Speech made on the 24th anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia.
