His iron sentences—cold and harsh—sunk deep into my heart, and stirred up not only my feelings into a sort of rebellion, but awakened within me a slumbering train of vital thought.
In his autobiography, Douglass describes the profound effect of overhearing Master Hugh explain why enslaved people must be kept ignorant.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
The vote of the colored man, formerly beaten down and stamped out by intimidation, is now revived, sought, and defended by powerful allies, and this from no transient sentiment of the moment, but from the permanent laws controlling the…
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.
Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.