Frederick Douglass Quotes

“My cause, first, midst, last, and always,” he wrote, “was and is that of the black man; not because he is black, but because he is a man.”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“There was no point in trying to compensate for the crimes of the past, but “the nearest approach to justice to the negro for the past is to do him justice in the present.”19 That meant integrating schools and ending legal barriers to employment and property ownership.”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative[s],” wrote one Bostonian, “and waked up stark mad abolitionists.”7”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“President Franklin Pierce, determined to demonstrate the federal government’s resolve to enforce the act, dispatched 2,000 soldiers to Boston to recapture a single fugitive.”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“Douglass’s feeling of pride at choosing his own employment was soured somewhat when white laborers on the wharves threatened to quit if the boss hired a black man.”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“Beat and cuff the slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog,” but “give him a good master, and he wishes to become his own master.”1”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“If religion had any effect on his character at all, it made him more cruel and hateful.”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“Hugh Auld was wise to fear slave literacy. Reading could kindle in a slave a desire for learning and for a personal future, thus undermining slavery’s consistent effort to stamp out any sense of self-worth.”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“His curiosity aroused by seeing Sophia read the Bible, Douglass asked her to teach him. Naively, she agreed. He caught on rapidly, and Sophia was proud enough of her student to mention his progress to Hugh. He exploded. Literacy, he cried, would “spoil the best nigger in the world,” and “unfit him to be a slave.”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“A mere look, word, or motion,—a mistake, accident, or want of power,—are all matters for which the slave may be whipped at any time,” wrote Douglass”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man

“But it would be more precise to say that the master aimed to transform the slave into an automaton by obliterating his sense of personhood.”
― Timothy Sandefur, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man