Frederick Douglass: “The man had obtained complete control over me; and if he had commanded me to do any possible thing, I should, in my then…”

The friendless and hungry boy, in his extremest need, found himself in the strong protecting arms of his mother.

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

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

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.