Douglass: ‘A sensible modification of black’

“When Douglass displayed pride in presenting himself as the product of a racially mixed parentage — ‘a very sensible modification of black,’  he told an 1872  Raleigh, North Carolina, audience — he was implicitly presenting himself as a prototype of the future American, even the modern man of the future.”

— From “Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism” by Peter C. Myers (2008)