Frederick Douglass: “Slavery was the idol of Virginia, and pardon and life to Brown meant condemnation and death to slavery.”

The sentiment that brings us here to-day is one of the noblest that can stir and thrill the human heart.

That the mother was a slave was enough for its deadly purpose.

The day we celebrate is preëminently the colored man’s day.

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.