Frederick Douglass: “Color, therefore, was a very unsatisfactory basis for slavery.”

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 looked into this kitchen with peculiar interest, and remembered that it was there I last saw my mother.

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

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