Frederick Douglass: “Had I been asked in the days of slavery to visit this man, I should have regarded the invitation as one to put fetters…”

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

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

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.

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.