Frederick Douglass: “I had reason to fear that my sable face might prove altogether too transparent for the safe concealment of my hazardous…”

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.

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.

I believed I should get enough to eat at Covey’s, even if I suffered in other respects, and this to a hungry man is not a prospect to be regarded with indifference.

True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.