Frederick Douglass: “He could create the offense whenever it pleased him.”

Guilty or not guilty, to be accused was to be sure of a flogging.

I looked into this kitchen with peculiar interest, and remembered that it was there I last saw my mother.

It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.

This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.