American Experience

Your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns are fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy, a thin veil to cover crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There's not a nation on earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour. It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind and the earthquake.

ERICA ARMSTRONG DUNBAR

Douglass needs for slavery to be eradicated, and he needs it to happen as quickly as possible. In many ways, he reflects this for the rest of black America, that while Garrisonian tactics were just, earnest, they simply were not options that he thought would eventually lead to the end of slavery. On the one level, you hate to reduce it to race. On the other, it's a reality. No matter how many stories Garrison hears, no matter how many coffles he sees, no matter how many mothers he can imagine and conjure up, Douglass has had that experience. Garrison is a white man in a white man's America.