Frederick Douglass: “I was several times dragged from the cars for the crime of being colored.”

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.

The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.

He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.

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.