Frederick Douglass

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, in approximately February 1818; his mother was an enslaved woman and his father was likely a white man, possibly his owner, though precise parentage is uncertain in the historical record. Separated from his mother in early childhood, he spent his youth under different enslavers and was exposed to both harsh conditions and limited opportunities to learn, secretly teaching himself to read and write when he had the chance. In 1838 Douglass escaped slavery, eventually reaching New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he settled and adopted the surname Douglass. He became involved with local abolitionists and in 1841, after an impromptu speech at an anti-slavery meeting in Nantucket and later at conventions, he was invited to lecture for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, launching his career as a public orator. To counter disbelief that an escaped enslaved person could be so eloquent, Douglass wrote and published his first autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in 1845, which became a bestseller and established his reputation as a writer and intellectual leader in the abolitionist movement. He also edited and published abolitionist newspapers, including The North Star, using journalism and speeches to argue forcefully against slavery and for full civil and political rights for African Americans and for women’s rights. Throughout the 1850s and during the Civil War, Douglass pressed for emancipation and for the right of Black men to serve as soldiers in the Union Army, assisted recruitment of United States Colored Troops, and used his platform to press presidents and politicians to move toward abolition and equal rights. After the war he continued to advocate for the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, served in several federal appointments in the postwar era, and remained an outspoken critic of discrimination until his death in 1895.