There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution.

The line reframes racial injustice as a failure of the nation rather than a deficiency in Black people. By denying that there is a distinct “Negro problem,” it rejects the common 19th‑century trope that African Americans themselves were the obstacle to social order. Instead, it indicts the broader public for lacking the civic virtues—loyalty, honor, patriotism—required to uphold constitutional principles of equal rights. The quote’s force lies in its constitutional appeal: it treats the Constitution not as an abstract ideal but as a binding moral and political contract. In Douglass’s idiom, true patriotism is measured by fidelity to those guarantees, not by rhetoric or national self-congratulation.