Frederick Douglass: “The abolition of slavery has not merely emancipated the negro, but liberated the whites; taken the lock from their…”

Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.

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.

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