Frederick Douglass: “I was allowed to ride in peace, not because I was a man, and had paid my fare, but because I belonged to somebody?”

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.

It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.

His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.

We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.