Frederick Douglass

We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves between the nation and the nation’s destroyers.

Such men increase the faith of all in the possibilities of their race, and make it easier for those who are to come after them.

All sorts of reasons against my appointment, but the true one, were given, and that was withheld more from a sense of shame, than from a sense of justice.

But the most dreadful thing threatened, was a colored man at the Executive Mansion in white kid gloves, sparrow-tailed coat, patent leather boots, and alabaster cravat, performing the ceremony--a very empty one--of introducing the…

It is the easiest thing in the world, as all editors know, to pervert the meaning and give a one-sided impression of a whole speech by simply giving isolated passages from the speech itself, without any qualifying connections.

I am not such a fool as to decry a city in which I have invested my money and made my permanent residence.

But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.

Elsewhere we may belong to a section, but here we belong to a whole country, and the whole country belongs to us.

Under its lofty domes and stately pillars, as under the broad blue sky, all races and colors of men stand upon a footing of common equality.

He is an owner of the marble grandeur which he beholds about him,--as much so as any of the forty millions of this great nation.

From this condition, shocking for a southern man to contemplate, it is now seen that nothing less powerful than the naked iron arm of the negro, can save her.

Harmless, beautiful, proper, and praiseworthy as this demonstration is, I cannot forget that no such demonstration would have been tolerated here twenty years ago.