31 Quotes by David W. Blight

Mr. Obama has always been at heart a healer, a reconciler eager to find common ground with people who hated him for ideological, political and racial reasons. It is a primary reason for his political success and status today as the most admired political figure in our culture.

Douglass told white northern voters that 'The blood of the slave is on your garments. You have said that slavery is better than freedom. That war is better than peace. And that cruelty is better than humanity.

By the Rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.

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.

All great autobiography is about loss, about the hopeless but necessary quest to retrieve and control a past that forever slips away. Memory is both inspiration and burden, method and subject, the thing one cannot live with or without.

My poor mother,” Douglass wrote, “like many other slave women, had many children, but NO FAMILY!”21.

Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. – FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1855.

We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe.

Douglass told white northern voters that ‘The blood of the slave is on your garments. You have said that slavery is better than freedom. That war is better than peace. And that cruelty is better than humanity.