I remember reading a part of a book by, I believe, a former slave.
Please help me figure out his name.
I believe the time frame is late 1800s.
This was just a small part of the book, but he wrote about people who make a living off of the existence of racism, saying that these people have no interest in ending racism as it is their source of livelihood.
Fredrick Douglass wrote a fairly famous account of his time as a slave/the general issues of slavery in the mid-late 1800s. Without more information, I would assume that it was one of his three autobiographies.
If it wasn't Frederick Douglass, then you may be thinking of W. E. B. Du Bois or Olaudah Equiano.