Frederick Douglass: “The first two hours of that morning were such as I never experienced before, and hope never to again.”

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

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.

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.

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