Quaker mother; in 1839 he became an
Abolitionist lecturer instead of enrolling in college.]

[Footnote 3: Editor's Note to Dover Edition: Abigail Kelley Foster
(1811-1887), who married another Abolitionist, Stephen Foster, in
1845, was a Quaker orator and organizer on behalf of the abolition of
slavery and for women's right to vote.]

Douglass had plunged into this new work, after the first embarrassment
wore off, with all the enthusiasm of youth and hope. But, except among
the little band of Garrisonians and their sympathizers, his position
did not relieve him from the disabilities attaching to his color.
The feeling toward the negro in New England in 1841 was but little
different from that in the State of Georgia to-day. Men of color were
regarded and treated as belonging to a distinctly inferior order of
creation. At hotels and places of public resort they were refused
entertainment. On railroads and steamboats they were herded off by
themselves in mean and uncomfortable cars. If welcomed in churches
at all, they were carefully restricted to the negro pew. As in the
Southern States to-day, no distinction was made among them in these
respects by virtue of dress or manners or culture or means; but all
were alike discriminated against because of their dark skins. Some
of Douglass's abolition friends, among whom he especially mentions
Wendell Phillips and two others of lesser note, won their way to his
heart by at all times refusing to accept privileges that were denied
to their swarthy companion. Douglass resented proscription wherever
met with, and resisted it with force when the odds were not too
overwhelming. More than once he was beaten and maltreated by railroad
conductors and brakemen. For a time the Eastern Railroad ran its cars
through Lynn, Massachusetts, without stopping, because Douglass, who
resided at that time in Lynn, insisted on riding in the white people's
car, and made trouble when interfered with. Often it was impossible
for the abolitionists to secure a meeting-place; and in several
instances Douglass paraded the streets with a bell, like a town crier,
to announce that he would lecture in the open air.

Some of Douglass's friends, it must be admitted, were at times rather
extreme in their language, and perhaps stirred up feelings that a
more temperate vocabulary would not have aroused. None of them ever
hesitated to call a spade a spade, and some of them denounced slavery
and all its sympathizers