Frederick Douglass: “It does not seem right that we should have been so left, but it fully explains our present poverty and wretchedness.”

His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.

For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.

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

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