"Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! If you see him going to the dinner table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot box, let him go! If you see him going to the school, let him go! If you see him going to the office, let him go! Let him alone!"

Frederick Douglass, 'What the Black Man Wants', speech delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Boston, April 1865. Douglass was a formerly enslaved man who had become the leading African American intellectual and abolitionist. The speech was delivered weeks before the end of the Civil War.