It 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.
Douglass reflects on the moment he understood the deliberate mechanisms used by white slaveholders to maintain the enslavement of Black people.
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It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.
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.