Frederick Douglass

They taught me that all colored men were not light-hearted triflers, incapable of serious thought or effort.

Young (21 years), strong, and active, and ambitious to do my full share, I soon made myself useful, and I think liked by the men who worked with me, though they were all white.

Ricketson, I found what is of the utmost importance to a young man just starting in life--constant employment and regular wages.

The consciousness that I was free--no longer a slave--kept me cheerful under this, and many similar proscriptions, which I was destined to meet in New Bedford, and elsewhere on the free soil of Massachusetts.

Slavery had inured me to hardships that made ordinary trouble sit lightly upon me.

The test of the real civilization of the community came when I applied for work at my trade, and then my repulse was emphatic and decisive.

Notwithstanding the just and humane sentiment of New Bedford three and forty years ago, the place was not entirely free from race and color prejudice.

It was new business to me, but I never did better work, or more of it in the same space of time for Covey, the negro-breaker, than I did for myself in these earliest years of my freedom.

I was not only a freeman but a free-working man, and no Master Hugh stood ready at the end of the week to seize my hard earnings.

To understand the emotion which swelled my heart as I clasped this money, realizing that I had no master who could take it from me--that it was mine--that my hands were my own, and could earn more of the precious coin--one must have been…

There too the black man’s children attended the same public schools with the white man’s children, and apparently without objection from any quarter.

I saw in New Bedford the nearest approach to freedom and equality that I had ever seen.