Frederick Douglass: “There is in him that union of head and heart, which is indispensable to an enlightenment of the heads and a winning of…”

The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.

The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves.

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.

Slavery had no recognition of fathers, as none of families.