Quotes About Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass had charged the air with rebellion and redemption, and these in turn had supported him in the heat of abolitionism. But the atmosphere changed to one of repression after the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

As I grew older, my love for reading grew stronger. I read with studious interest everything I could find relating to colored men who had gained prominence. My heroes had been King David, then Robert the Bruce; now Frederick Douglass was enshrined in the place of honor.

Well, I was always a bit of a political junkie. Even as a kid I would read biographies of presidents and of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

Grafton, Massachusetts, in early 1842, while working solo, Douglass was met by mob hostility in addition to an unwelcoming clergy. So he went to a hotel and borrowed a "dinner-bell, with which in hand I passed through the principal streets," he recalled, "ringing the bell and crying out, 'Notice! Frederick Douglass, recently a slave, will lecture on American Slavery, on Grafton Common, this evening at 7 o'clock."13

It is the mission of the printer to diffuse light and knowledge by a judicious intermingling of black with white.

Sensing an abandonment of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wondered what good abolition had been for the black man if "having been freed from the slaveholder's lash, he is to be subject to the slaveholder's shotgun?

Frederick Douglass, who had entertained hopes for the Haitian post, graciously conceded defeat. "Your appointment," he told Bassett, "is a grand achievement for yourself and for our whole people.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.

Slavery is indeed gone, but its shadow still lingers over the country and poisons more or less the moral atmosphere of all sections of the republic.

Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful. Once I got into it, I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person singular, talking about the first-person plural, always saying 'I,' meaning 'we.'

Abolition seemed a fantasy when Frederick Douglass called for all slaves to be released.

I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored man's political hopes and the ark of his safety.

I recognize the Republican Party as the sheet anchor of the colored man's political hopes and the ark of his safety.

There ain't nothing gets a Yankee madder than a smart colored person, of which I reckon they figured there was only one in the world, Mr. Douglass.

In 1863 Lincoln desegregated the White House staff, which initiated a desegregation of the federal government that lasted until Woodrow Wilson. Lincoln opened the White House to black callers, notably Frederick Douglass. He also continued to wrestle with his own racism, asking aides to investigate the feasibility of deporting (euphemistically termed colonizing) African Americans to Africa or Latin America.

Gandhi said it; Frederick Douglass said it. A lot of people have probably said 'It's not Christ that I have a problem with, it's his people.' And that was my struggle: it's God's people. I felt disenfranchisement. I felt so much abuse from organized religion because I'm walking in a direction that a lot of them couldn't fathom and can't understand.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.

This is why Frederick Douglass (unlike many Americans today who have never taken the time to study the Constitution) could therefore emphatically declare that the Constitution – all of the Constitution – was anti-slavery.

...Slavery appears such a relatively mild business that one begins to wonder why Frederick Douglass and so many others ever tried to escape.

The Republican abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had once denounced the founding as a hideous compromise with slavery, came to understand the accomplishment of the framers. "Abolish slavery tomorrow," he said, "and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution needs to be altered.

Tubman is the subject of more children's books than any other African American historical figure, including Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, her