An excerpt from a speech in which former slave, Bayley Wyat,
protests the eviction of blacks from confiscated Virginia
plantations. We has a right to the land here we are located. For
why? I tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, have
been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now
locate upon; for that reason we have a divine right to the land.
… And then didn’t we clear the land and raise the crops of corn,
of cotton, of tobacco, of rice, of sugar, of everything? And
then didn’t large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and
the sugars and the rice that we made! … I say they have grown
rich, and my people are poor. Bayley Wyat, A Freedman’s speech.
Philadelphia: Published by Friends’ association of Philadelphia
and its vicinity for the relief of colored freedmen, circa 1866,
Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.1590140b.