Frederick Douglass: “Everybody in the South seemed to want the privilege of whipping somebody else.”

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

The sentiment that brings us here to-day is one of the noblest that can stir and thrill the human heart.

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.

I wished it was possible I could remain small all my life, knowing that the sooner I grew large the shorter would be my time to remain with them.