Frederick Douglass: “It points the Negro out as an object of suspicion, avoidance and hate.”

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.

Guilty or not guilty, to be accused was to be sure of a flogging.

It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.

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