Frederick Douglass: “In the absence of these, the soul of the nation starves, sickens, and dies.”

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.

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

The friendless and hungry boy, in his extremest need, found himself in the strong protecting arms of his mother.

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