"It is said that the Negro is ignorant. But why is he ignorant? It comes with ill grace from a man who has put out my eyes to makea parade of my blindness,--to reproach me for my poverty when he has wronged me of my money.... If he is poor, what has become of the money he has been earning for the last two hundred and fifty years? Years ago it was said cotton fights and cotton conquers for American slavery. The Negro helped build up that great cotton power in the South, and in the North his sigh was in the whir of its machinery, and his blood and tears upon the warp and woof of its manufactures."

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Source: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frances Smith Foster (1990). “A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Reader”, p.109, Feminist Press at CUNY

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Frances Harper

Author, Activist

Frances Harper was a 19th-century African American author and activist known for her powerful writings on racial and gender equality.

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"If we have had no past, it is well for us to look hopefully to the future - for the shadows bear the promise of a brighter coming day."

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