“If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”
— Frederick Douglass
This quote is from Douglass's 1857 speech on West India Emancipation, delivered in Canandaigua, New York. It became one of the most cited lines in the history of American civil rights advocacy.
I was born a slave in Maryland. Never knew my exact birthday. My mother was taken from me as an infant. I taught myself to read by trading bread for lessons with white boys in the neighborhood. Reading ruined me for slavery and saved me for everything else. I escaped at twenty, spoke at my first abolitionist meeting, and never stopped. If you are waiting for permission to fight for your own life, you will wait forever. Take it.