It's not light that we need, but fire.
It's not the gentle shower, but thunder.
We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
~ Frederick Douglass
”The institution of slavery was a disease deeply embedded in the tissue of the newly formed American republic. It proved beyond the sagacity of the Founding Fathers to cure, and left undisturbed it festered, ready to prove fatal to the Union.
In Massachusetts, slavery was abolished not through legislative fiat, but by judicial action in the 1780s. On the national stage, slavery survived, to be destroyed only after a long and bloody civil war. While causes for the Civil War – political, economic and cultural – were varied, the essence of the fight, especially for Massachusetts, was always about slavery and the defense of human dignity and freedom. The call to this fight went out and was answered. In the press and on the streets, from the pulpit, lecture podium, and eventually the battlefield, blacks in the Commonwealth stepped forward and helped change the course of history.