Frederick Douglass: “The crime of teaching a slave to read is punishable with severe fines and imprisonment, and, in some instances, with…”

It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.

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

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

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.