ThirstyFish

Occupy Bergen County, NJ, joined the Occupy May Day event, recognizing inequalities suffered by neighborhoods and communities all over the United States. Their sign, a quote from an 1857 speech by Frederick Douglass, read: "Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will".

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was an African American social reformer, orator, statesman and writer, who believed in the equality of all people; black, female, Native American, or immigrant. Born into slavery, he escaped in 1838 at the age of twenty. Douglass' activist career began when he was invited to speak about his experiences by abolitionist. When he published his first autobiography in 1845, skeptics questioned how a black man could have produced such an eloquent piece of literature. He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves did not have the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. After a trip to Ireland and Britain, he continued with his activism, fighting for women's rights and women's suffrage. He lectured about the unconstitutionality of slavery. Douglass believed that education was the key for African Americans to improve their lives, and was an early advocate of desegregation of schools. After the Civil War and the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, he continued to lecture and write about women's rights, and the segregation laws in former Confederacy states.

"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning".
- Frederick Douglass

More Occupy photos.

Song of the Day: Shout - Tears For Fears (1984)