Frederick Douglass: “The South has always known how to have a dog hanged by giving him a bad name.”

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.

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.

The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.

Slavery had no recognition of fathers, as none of families.