A Quote by Al Sharpton

In every era going back to Lincoln with Frederick Douglass, presidents talk to those that were leading at that time. — © Al Sharpton
In every era going back to Lincoln with Frederick Douglass, presidents talk to those that were leading at that time.
Frederick Douglass ran a primary campaign against [Abraham Lincoln] the second time around, in 1864. They hated him. Why'd they hate him? Because he said things like "I believe in white supremacy."
Well, I was always a bit of a political junkie. Even as a kid I would read biographies of presidents and of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.
Mark Twain married the daughter of one of New York State's leading Abolitionists, Jervis Langdon, who helped Frederick Douglass who became the great Negro leader to escape from slavery.
Growing up, I read all three of Frederick Douglass' autobiographies by the time I was 12.
All presidents - particularly war presidents, presidents inclined to the imperial presidency - invoke Abraham Lincoln as a justification, but they omit these three defenses of Lincoln's strong actions. Suspend habeas, blockade, increase army without congress, arrest Maryland legislators, etc.
William Lloyd Garrison was up there with Frederick Douglass being thrown off trains and going through what happened in the 1960s in 1840 in Boston.
Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. To say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity.
It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips - these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?
Abolition seemed a fantasy when Frederick Douglass called for all slaves to be released.
We need to talk about representation for queer people in the media and also in law. And there's a long history of drag queens leading those discussions in marches on the street and even in bars going back to the time of Stonewall and before.
If you meet your heroes, you're always going to be disappointed. Frederick Douglass was a great man, but would I want my daughter to marry him? Probably not. That doesn't mean that I don't think he's a great man.
Frederick Douglass had to teach himself how to read before standing up to defeat slavery.
Let's assume for the moment that the logic behind Presidents Day is actually sound for certain presidents. Why not have a separate holiday for Lincoln and one for Washington - as we used to do, before we became so concerned with the 'Every President Gets a Trophy' ethos?
I don't know that there has ever been a time when Abraham Lincoln didn't stand head-and-shoulders above all other presidents in the historians' eye. But relatively speaking, there have been peaks and a troughs. One peak was in the 1910s-20s; a major trough was in the 1970s-80s. We are certainly on a peak again, something which began in 1994 with Michael Burlingame's 'The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln,' which showed in fabulous detail how many new and untapped sources were available on Lincoln.
...Slavery appears such a relatively mild business that one begins to wonder why Frederick Douglass and so many others ever tried to escape.
We [black people] don't respect our elders. Besides artists, we don't respect Frederick Douglass. We don't respect Martin Luther King. You look at every Martin Luther King Boulevard out here, and it's a crack block. That's not because of white people. That's because of black leadership. We just have that problem, and it's something that I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to conquer.
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