If there is no struggle there is no progress.

Frederick Douglass spoke these words at Canandaigua, New York, on 3 August 1857, at a celebration of West India Emancipation, the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean, which took effect on 1 August 1834. Just before, he answers white abolitionists who disliked “colored conventions” and called him ungrateful for pleading “our common cause as a colored man, rather than as a Garrisonian”. Then he offers “a word of the philosophy of reform”: every concession to liberty has been “born of earnest struggle”.

The line follows, with images from nature: those who favour freedom but disparage agitation “want crops without plowing up the ground”, rain without thunder, the ocean without its roar. The struggle may be moral or physical, “but it must be a struggle”, for “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

Douglass, who had escaped slavery in 1838, was by then a famous orator and editor. He spoke months after the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision denied citizenship to Black Americans. Activists have quoted the passage ever since.

West India Emancipation, speech delivered at Canandaigua, New York, 3 August 1857, 1857

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