Frederick Douglass: “I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day.”

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

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

If I have had kicks, I have also had kindness.

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.