Frederick Douglass: “With such odds against them, and only an idea--though a grand one--to support them, it will ever be a wonder that they…”

The friendless and hungry boy, in his extremest need, found himself in the strong protecting arms of his mother.

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.

The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.

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