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.
In his autobiography, Douglass recounts the moment he understood the deliberate mechanisms used by white men to maintain the institution of slavery.
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Still another ground of hope I find in the fact that colored men are strong in their gratitude to benefactors, and firm in their political convictions.
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.
None now denies the ability of the colored race to acquire knowledge of anything which can be communicated to the human understanding by letters.