Frederick Douglass: “I am about to answer the inquiry, what is American slavery?”

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

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.

The day we celebrate is preëminently the colored man’s day.

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