Frederick Douglass: “She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness.”

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

The laws which determine the destinies of individuals and nations are impartial and eternal.

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.

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.