“It is only prejudice against the negro which calls every one, however nearly connected with the white race, and however remotely connected with the negro race, a negro.”

—  Frederick Douglass

The motive is not a desire to elevate the negro, but to humiliate and degrade those of mixed blood; not a desire to bring the negro up, but to cast the mulatto and the quadroon down by forcing him below an arbitrary and hated color line.
1880s, The Future of the Colored Race (1886)

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Frederick Douglass photo
Frederick Douglass 274
American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman 1818–1895

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