I was not long in bringing around me twenty or thirty young men, who enrolled themselves gladly in my Sabbath-school, and were willing to meet me regularly under the trees or elsewhere, for the purpose of learning to read.
Douglass describes the rapid growth and enthusiastic participation in his clandestine Sabbath-school, where enslaved men gathered to learn to read.
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I wished it was possible I could remain small all my life, knowing that the sooner I grew large the shorter would be my time to remain with them.
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.