Frederick Douglass Quotes
A man's character always takes its hue, more or less, from the form and color of things about him.
Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855, p. 55.
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Likewise, Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.
