On the recordJanuary 1, 1855
His voice is the voice of a man, and his cry is the cry of a man in distress, and man must cease to be man before he can become insensible to that cry.
Said by
Frederick Douglass
Source
gutenberg.orgHis voice is the voice of a man, and his cry is the cry of a man in distress, and man must cease to be man before he can become insensible to that cry.
In his autobiography, Douglass argues that the cry of an enslaved person is universally human, and to ignore it is to deny one's own humanity.
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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.
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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.