Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 16

18. Frederick Douglass, Address by Hon. Frederick Douglass, Delivered in the Congregational Church, Washington, D. C., April 16, 1883. On the Twenty-First Anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia (Washington, DC: n.p., 1883). (16 p.)

Address in which Douglass dismisses colonization as a solution to the race problem and urges the audience to pursue their civil rights within the social and political context of the country. “But I will say that I do not look for colonization either in or out of the United States. Africa is too far off, even if we desired to go there, which we do not. The navy of all of the world would not be sufficient to remove our natural increase to that far-off country. Removal to any of the territories is out of the question. . . There is but one destiny, it seems to me, left for us, and that is to make ourselves and be made by others a part of the American people in every sense of the word. Assimilation and not isolation is our true policy and our natural destiny.” (The collection has additional copies of this speech in volumes 31 [no. 2] and 34 [no. 15].)