Frederick Douglass

My grandmother was all the world to me, and the thought of being separated from her was a most unwelcome suggestion to my affections and hopes.

Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.

The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.

That the mother was a slave was enough for its deadly purpose.

Slavery had no recognition of fathers, as none of families.

It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.

Old as the everlasting hills; immovable as the throne of God; and certain as the purposes of eternal power, against all hinderances, and against all delays, and despite all the mutations of human instrumentalities, it is the faith of my…

Its foundations are laid in the deepest and holiest convictions, and from whatever soul the demon, selfishness, is expelled, there will this cause take up its abode.

Such is the voice of experience, such has been the past, such is the present, and such will be that future, which, so sure as man is man, will come.

Give, give, will be its cry, till the timidity which concedes shall give place to courage, which shall resist.

The heart of pity, which would melt in due time over the brutal chastisements it sees inflicted on the helpless, must be hardened.

Every new-born white babe comes armed from the Eternal presence, to make war on slavery.