Frederick Douglass: “The outspread wing of American christianity, apparently broad enough to give shelter to a perishing world, refuses to…”

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.

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

I looked into this kitchen with peculiar interest, and remembered that it was there I last saw my 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.