Frederick Douglass: “He is now what he has ever been, a loyal, law-abiding, hard working and peaceable man; so much so that men have thought…”

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.

It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.

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