Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglasswas an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement from Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writings. In his time he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a...
ProfessionAutobiographer
Date of Birth14 February 1818
CityTalbot County, MD
Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.
I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.
A government, founded on impartial liberty, where all have a voice and a vote, irrespective of color or of sex--what is there to hinder such a government from standing firm.
Be not discouraged. There is a future for you. . . . The resistance encountered now predicates hope. . .
Oppression makes a wise man mad.
I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
The opposite of compromise is character.
The simplest truths often meet the sternest resistance and are slowest in getting general acceptance.
To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.
My hopes were never brighter than now.
I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute!
Your national greatness, swelling vanity; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.
Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.