BUTTIGIEG NAMES HIS SPENDING PROJECT AFTER THE WRONG GUY: FREDERICK DOUGLASS WANTED NOTHING TO DO WITH WHITE GUYS OFFERING “HELP”: Pete Buttigieg is earnestly trying to bail himself out of his troubles with African American voters by throwing large sums of money in their direction. It will be like a new Marshall Plan, he says.

He calls his initiative the “Douglass Plan” after the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. But Buttigieg couldn’t have chosen a less likely person to name his spending program after. Douglass hated that sort of thing. He famously said:

The question is asked, and pressed with a great show of earnestness at this momentous crisis of our nation’s history, What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated?

… Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone. The Negro should have been let alone in Africa—let alone when the pirates and robbers offered him for sale in our Christian slave markets—(more cruel and inhuman than the Mohammedan slave markets)—let alone by courts, judges, politicians, legislators and slavedrivers—let alone altogether, and assured that they were thus to be let alone forever, and that they must now make their own way in the world, just the same as any and every other variety of the human family. As colored men, we only ask to be allowed to do with ourselves, subject only to the same great laws for the welfare of human society which apply to other men, Jew, Gentiles, Barbarian, Sythian. Let us stand upon our own legs, work with our own hands, and eat bread in the sweat of our own brows. When you, our white fellow countrymen, have attempted to do anything for us, it has generally been to deprive us of some right, power or privilege which you yourself would die before you would submit to have taken from you.

I always liked Douglass.