The Reading Room
A source
Power Concedes Nothing
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.
From Douglass's 1857 address on West India Emancipation, and the clearest sentence ever written about how change actually happens. Power does not improve on its own, he insisted, and waiting politely for it to is a strategy that has never once worked. The demand comes first; the concession, if it comes, comes after. It is the conscience of the founding turned into a method, and a permanent answer to anyone who tells the wronged to be patient. The most-quoted line in the whole tradition of American protest, and it earns the quoting.