Frederick Douglass: “We are asked not only why hold a convention, but with emphasis, why hold a colored convention?”

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

Our very lack of preparation for the conflict disposed us to look for some other than the way of blood out of the difficulty.

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