I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.

The saying contrasts passive, purely verbal piety with decisive action. “Prayed with my legs” is a vivid metaphor for taking concrete steps—especially self-liberating steps—rather than waiting for providence to intervene. Attributed to Douglass, it aligns with themes central to his public thought: moral urgency, self-emancipation, and the critique of religious rhetoric that excuses injustice. The line’s punch comes from reframing prayer as something enacted in the world, implying that freedom and justice require human agency and risk, not only supplication. Even if apocryphal, it functions as a succinct expression of abolitionist pragmatism: faith without action changes little.