by GSR Staff
"For 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. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced."
- Frederick Douglass, American abolitionist (1817-1895), from an Independence Day speech given in Rochester, N.Y. on July 4, 1852, (in a northern state where slavery was illegal, while approximately four million people were still enslaved in the U.S. South).
June 19 is Juneteenth, the observation of Emancipation Day in the United States; it began in Galveston, Texas, in 1865