The Rage and the Sorrow are Bottomless: Thoughts on the Words of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr.

The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass observed that slavery degraded the slaveholder as much as it degraded the slave. Of his kind-hearted mistress who had never before owned a slave, he wrote:

“My mistress was, as I have said, a kind and tender-hearted woman; and in the…