If There Is No Struggle There

Douglass delivered this line in his "West India Emancipation" speech at Canandaigua, New York, on August 3, 1857, commemorating the anniversary of British emancipation in the Caribbean. The full passage is a sustained argument against those who counselled patience to abolitionists: Douglass insisted that without organised agitation and demand, those in power would never voluntarily surrender it. The line became one of the most quoted statements of the American abolitionist movement.