Frederick Douglass: “Press, platform and pulpit are generally either silent or they openly apologise for the mob and its deeds.”

It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.

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.

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