ADVICE TO BLACK YOUTH: AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK, ON 1 FEBRUARY 1855
New York Daily Times, 3 February 1855.
The Young Men’s Literary and Productive Society, organized by the Reverend Levin Tilmon among the youth of his First Colored American Congregational Methodist Church in New York City, invited Douglass to present a series of lectures “on the great question of Education and Human Liberty” during the Society’s annual “Literary Festival” in the winter of 1854—55. Large audiences attended the two lectures that Douglass offered at Tilmon’s church on Sixth Street on 28 January and 1 February 1855. Glasgow-educated physician James McCune Smith, who joined Douglass and Tilmon on the platform on the second occasion, later informed readers of Frederick Douglass’ Paper that he found the lecture “a very able and eloquent treatment of the argument that condition and not complexion is the chief cause of prejudice and caste in our land.” After Douglass’s speech, the meeting adopted ten resolutions, several of which expressed support for Douglass’s newspaper. Recalling that in 1831 GarrisonGarrison, William Lloyd

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 188589); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72. had argued that black people required “a band of educated (colored) men . . . [to] vindicate our rights in a manner which no white man can,” the meeting unanimously affirmed “that we find in Frederick Douglass. a graduate of the University of Maryland, the accomplished advocate contemplated." FDP, 27 October 1854, 19 January, 9 February 1855; H. Wilson, comp., Trow's New York City Directory (New York, 1855), Appendix, 47.
Mr. Douglass commenced by remarking on his lack of literary attainment, for he was deprived of all means of education. He therefore attributed the invitation which he had received from the Young Men’s Literary Club to an acknowledgement of his labors in behalf of the colored race with whom he felt proud to be identified. He rejoiced to see in New York a society like the one which he had the honor to address.
The colored people, he continued, had a special mission to perform in the United States—a mission which none but themselves could perform. Many people, even persons of color, thought that any effort of the colored people exclusively to alleviate their present condition was mischievous, and only served to make their bondage more galling. He did not believe in such an idea. All experience taught that if a man could not stand he must fall, and that if he stood it must be on his own legs. The Abolitionists did not act rightly; they attempted to support, to bear up, the colored people, and looked upon any other method as an impeachment of their cause.

He argued strongly that the prejudice of, or hatred to. the colored people in this country was not on account of their color, but because the color was an indicator in the Southern States of Slavery, and in the Northern States of isolation. The history of nations proved that an oppressed people were always looked down upon by their oppressors. As an instance, in Britain, and even in this country, an Irishman was generally spoken of contemptuously, yet the Irish were not, in intellect, an inferior people. History proved the contrary. Many of the most eminent men that the world has ever seen were natives of Ireland. The fact being then that the hostility to negroes,—he was not ashamed to be called a negro, he believed the name would yet be honorable—was not because their skin was black, but because their black skin indicated an inferiority of caste, should be sufficient to induce every individual of the African race to exertion in self-culture, that they might rise in the social scale above their present condition. To this end he applauded the establishment of literary and kindred societies among the colored people.
He felt convinced that the colored man, by proper exertion, would vindicate himself against the assertions now so common, that they were an inferior people intellectually and morally. He must confess that this feeling was general. How could it be otherwise when it was constantly in the mouth of every shallow spouter and scribbler—when it was shouted from the rostrums and preached from the press—when even “star-eyed science” was enlisted in the crusade—when the NOTTS, the GLIDDONS, the AGASSIZS, the FLETCHERS and GORDONS,¹Douglass refers to Josiah Clark Nott, George R. Gliddon, and Louis Jean Rodolphe Agassiz. “Fletchers and Gordons" is probably a garbled reference to James Cowles Prichard and Samuel George Morton. upheld it by plausible reasoning—upheld it even in contradiction to the statements of the Bible. He believed the negro race equal in every and all respects to the so-called Anglo-Saxon, the superiority of which was dinned so constantly in the public ear.
In conclusion, he advised the Society to keep on their good work—to learn, to improve—that they might prove themselves men as good as the best. Money he regarded as a great power. He who had money would not occupy a degraded position; hence he advised his young hearers to be economical to become rich, for the possession of wealth would tend greatly to advance them to that position, socially, to which they were entitled.