Frederick Douglass and the North Carolina Industrial Association Fair

Guest author: Karina Burbank

This blog is part of a series of posts featuring stories from the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) exhibit “A Fair to Remember: The History of the North Carolina State Fair.” The exhibit opens in the D.H. Hill Jr. Library’s exhibit gallery on March 27, 2025. The exhibit curator is Public History MA student Karina Burbank, and the exhibit designer is Conservation Services Manager Emily Schmidt.

As detailed in the Special Collections Research Center exhibit A Fair to Remember, abolitionist and civil rights leader Frederick Douglass visited Raleigh, NC in 1880. He gave an opening speech at the second State Fair run by the North Carolina Industrial Association, sometimes called the “Negro State Fair,” the “Colored State Fair,” or the “State Fair of the Colored People of North Carolina.” The North Carolina Industrial Association was a Raleigh-based organization of African American businessmen, farmers, and publishers who also published a newspaper called The Journal of Industry. Between 1879-1930, the North Carolina Industrial Association ran their own State Fair highlighting the labor and products of African American North Carolinians until the state stopped contributing funding and space. 

A reproduction of a handwritten draft of the address is displayed in A Fair to Remember, but The Journal of Industry published some of the speech after the fact. Below are transcribed selections from the newspaper printing, the entirety of which is available online here at the Library of Congress. These selections were transcribed by exhibit curator Karina Burbank.

Selections of Speech:

ORATION BY HON. FREDRICK DOUGLASS ON THE OCCASION OF THE SECOND ANNUAL EXPOSITION OF THE COLORED PEOPLE OF NORTH CAROLINA, DELIVERED ON FRIDAY OCTOBER 1ST 1880. 

At the conclusion of Gov. Jarvis’ address, the Master of Ceremonies introduced the Honorable Frederick Douglass, Marshal of the District of Columbia. Mr. Douglass prefaced his address by expressing the pleasure which he felt at being called upon to speak to so large a concourse of colored people, and his gratification at seeing the Governor of the State present, and speaking such words of sympathy and encouragement as he had just heard. He said he had found things quite different from what he expected, and that Gov. Jarvis occupied a good deal of the field which he had intended to make his own. His speech was interspersed with many amusing anecdotes which our limited space will not permit us to print in full. Mr. Douglass spoke as follows:

FELLOW CITIZENS, GENTLEMEN AND LADIES:

I regret that I have to begin my address with an apology. The days have been few and my engagements many since I was waited upon by a committee of gentlemen from North Carolina, representing this exposition, and was formally invited to appear in this place and presence and deliver an address appropriate for this occasion. The time allotted for the preparation and the magnitude of the subject upon which you have desired me to speak caused me some embarrassment and lead me at once to ask your kind indulgence. 

I am however, encouraged to proceed by several considerations: the first is this, I have often found myself in just some circumstances before. I have frequently been called upon to do things for which I had no special training or preparation. 

Another encouraging fact is, that however unskillfully and imperfectly, I have been able to do my work, my judges have been generous, if not always just. They have measured my efforts, not so much by their intrinsic value as by the difficulties under which they were made. But no more of apology. 

Mine to-day is a sure privilege. No man in this country was ever called upon to address such a concourse of newly emancipated people, as I am upon this occasion. I meet with you to-day, at the starting point in the race of mental, moral, social and material progress. For more than two centuries you were cut off from the human race. You were not recognized among the rest of mankind, and the principles of justice and liberty supposed to apply to other men, were not thought to be applicable to you. You were regarded and treated as standing outside the circle of civilization, and of civilizing forces. Having eyes, you were not expected to see. Having ears, you were not expected to hear. Having tongues, you were not expected to speak. The laws of the land classed you with horses, sheep and swine; articles of sale and barter, chattels personal, to all intents and purposes whatsoever. Your bodies, your bones, your brains belonged not to you, but to other men. Your faculties and powers were all the property and support of those who claimed to own you, their thoughts are turned to the change. Behold that change! How sudden, how complete, how vast and how wonderful is the transformation?

In view of this tremendous revolution, I feel less like dwelling on the particular subject upon which I am expected to speak, than calling upon you to join me, in loud, earnest, and long continued shouts of joy over our newly acquired freedom. 

The subject of agriculture is the main and most important which can claim our thoughtful attention. It is one of the oldest upon which men have thought, spoken and written, and it must therefore readily occur to you that there is little of originality to be expected in what I may have to say concerning it. Genius itself, and I am no genius, would find it hard to say anything new, edifying or striking in its praise or in its explanation. 

I have read over a number of agricultural addresses lately. I have got little help from them. They are very much like bricks on the same wall, or houses in Philadelphia, one is exactly the counterpart of the other, only some are a treble smaller than others. Mine to-day, should it get into print, will be like the others, only a little smaller. 

I think it is somewhat presumptive of me any how, to speak here on this subject at all. There are undoubtedly hundreds of colored men in North Carolina who could tell you more about farming than I can. You have among you practical farmers and mechanics and others well qualified by experience and observation, to teach intelligently and effectively the conditions essential to success, in their various conventions. The only trouble with that is that they live here and are easily attainable. They have not to travel a thousand miles when invited to speak and you do not have to travel a thousand miles to invite them. So it ever is, the prophet is not without honor, save in his own country. 

[...]

Like many other good and useful things, the plow, the king of agricultural implements, comes to us all the way from Africa. The Egyptians knew the plow before the white race was known to history. Their sense of its value is shown by their deification of its inventor as was done in Egypt. 

Deep plowing, under draining and thorough pulverization of the soil, so earnestly insisted upon of late years, were known in the east more than two thousand years ago.

[Several paragraphs skipped, including “A Word of Manures”]

WORN OUT LANDS

We hear a great deal about worn out lands, and of the necessity of leaving such lands and planting ourselves upon virgin soil. In our earlier history it was thought inevitable that land should wear out. This was especially so in the Southern States. The better opinion of to-day however, is that there need be no such thing as work out land. 

[...]

To be a successful farmer one must read as well as work. I cannot too strongly advise the reading of agricultural papers. They are the repositories of the best knowledge on the subject.[...] There is no work in the world which men are required to perform which they cannot perform better and more economically with education than without it. The trouble with us as a people, has been, that we have worked without a knowledge or the theory of work. We build ships but are not draftsmen, we build houses but are not architects, we sail vessels but know nothing of navigation. We cast the article but do not make the mould. Heretofore we have been simply muscle for the white man’s brain. We have worked by note, not by ingrained knowledge, by memory, not by reflection. 

I am not taking blame to ourselves or reproach anybody [sic]. The fault is not ours. It belongs to the unfriendly circumstances which have surrounded us in the dark past from which we are now emerging. Under the old regime we were not expected to think but to work. We were not to do as we thought, but as we were told. [...] We were but human machines operated under the lash and sting of slavery.

[...] Every colored mechanic and farmer should take and read one or more of the papers of the day. If you cannot read yourself let your son or daughter read to you. 

Depend upon it an hour spent thus, every day, will be an hour of profit and not of loss. Muscle is mighty but mind is mightier and there is no better field for its exercise than the field from which you expect to get your daily bread. 

[...]

NATURAL ENEMIES TO THE FARMER

[...]

Colored men, the people of African descent will find no cause in the history of agriculture, to be ashamed of their color, or of the continent from which they have come. If we have any rights to glory we may well glory in our relationship to agriculture and of Africa. 

I follow only the father of history–and many other authorities, when I assert that the Egyptians were black and their hair wooly. The denial of this statement is due to pregudice [sic] rather than to ascertained facts. But however this may be disputed, there is no denying that the Egyptians, Etheopians and the other great peoples of the North of Africa, resemble more the negro, than the Caucasian race. In color, form and features we stand akin to the greatest peoples of antiquity. Greece and Rome were indebted to Africa for their civilization. 

[...]

TREATMENT OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS

[...]

It ought to be the study of the farmers to make his horse his companion and friend. To do this there is but one certain rule, and that is the rule of kindness and sympathy. All brutal flogging and loud and boisterous driving, should be put away, and acts of sympathy and words of cheer, should be practiced instead. There is not much difference between horse nature and human nature, both need control, and both need kindness. 

[...]

THE WANTS OF OUR RACE, ARE [sic]

here quite in place. If we look abroad over our common country North and South, East and West, and observe the condition of the colored people, we shall find their greatest want to be that of regular and lucrative employments [sic]. We want the means of making money and the ability to keep it when we have made it. 

[...]

In the far North where ice and snow are almost perpetual, and in the far South where a virtical [sic] sun drinks all the moisture and leaves the earth a sandy and barren desert, agriculture is impossible.  Happily, you are subject to no such extremes here. No State in this vast union, is more highly favored than North Carolina. She has mountains, valleys, rivers and plains, a temperate climate, well deversified [sic] seasons and is blest [sic] with needed warmth and moisture, and is thus capable of the highest agricultural results.

Some old citizens, especially of the old master class, regret the changes which have taken place in your condition, and think of it and speak of it as the ruin of the State. They think in the loss of slavery they lost everything. 

There are many errors in the world, and some more hurtful than others, but there are few greater and more hurtful than this. Emancipation was not the destruction, but the salvation of North Carolina. It was not only a blessing to the slave, but a blessing to the master.

[...]

I give you my warmest congratulations, upon the fact that I am here speaking to a peaceful multitude in North Carolina to-day. I congratulate you upon this exhibition and upon what it implies. I congratulate you upon the example you have here set to our whole people. You have gone to work like earnest men, fully believing in the future of our race. You have wisely availed yourselves, of the well known principle and power of associated efforts of the wisdom of mutual cause and co-operation. [...]

[...]

Money is said to be the root of all evil–to my mind, the want of money is the root of very many evils. We are to-day dispised [sic] more for our poverty than for our race or color. In this world Emerson says nothing succeeds so well as success. I do not doubt that it is hard for a rich man to enter the Kingdom, but I know that it is not easy for a poor man to live in this world. A man must either support himself and surround himself with comfortable circumstances, or beg or steal, and neither of the latter invite respect.

[...]

WELL, WHAT ABOUT THE EXODUS?

[...]

I advise you North Carolinians to remain in North Carolina. You can more easily make North Carolina what North Carolina ought to be, than make yourselves in Indiana what you desire to be. Your going there too may arouse against you much the same feeling of which you justly complain here. 

Taking courage from what has been already done in our behalf, measuring the dark and dreadful depths from which we have come, considering the power and efficiency of the moral forces now employed in favor of human progress, the tendency of the nation, and our own elasticity and power of endurance, I cannot distrust or despair of the future. 

This annual exhibition of the fruits of your industry here in Raleigh is a telling contradiction to the story that you cannot live and flourish on the soil of your birth, and the fact that I am here addressing you, is a fact of some significance considering the times and who and what I am and have been.