Frederick Douglass: “The labor unions of the country should not throw away this colored element of strength.”

If I have had kicks, I have also had kindness.

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.

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.