Frederick Douglass: “Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us.”

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.

True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.

The day we celebrate is preëminently the colored man’s day.

Our very lack of preparation for the conflict disposed us to look for some other than the way of blood out of the difficulty.