Repost: Black History Month: Frederick Douglass

As an infant, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was separated from his slave mother—he never knew his white father—and lived with his grandmother on a Maryland plantation until, at age eight, his owner sent him to Baltimore to live as a house servant with the family of Hugh Auld.

Mrs. Auld defied state law by teaching him to read and when her husband discovered this he ordered his wife to stop, declaring that learning would make him unfit for slavery. But Frederick had found a thirst for knowledge, and he learned that knowledge is power, so he continued studying, secretly, with boys in the streets.

In 1833, hired out in Baltimore as a ship caulker, Frederick tried to escape with three others, but the plot was discovered before they could get away. Five years later, however, he fled to New York City and then to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he worked as a laborer for three years, eluding slave hunters by changing his surname to Douglass.

At a Nantucket, Massachusetts, antislavery convention in 1841, Douglass was invited to describe his feelings and experiences under slavery. His remarks were so poignant and naturally eloquent that he was catapulted into a new career as agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

To counter skeptics who doubted that such an articulate spokesman could ever have been a slave, Douglass decided to write his autobiography in 1845; it was revised several times over the years and completed in 1882 as Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

Yet he was still considered a runaway slave and to avoid recapture by his former owner, whose name and location he had given in the narrative, Douglass left America for a two-year speaking tour of Great Britain and Ireland. He returned with funds to purchase his freedom and also to start his own antislavery newspaper, the North Star (later Frederick Douglass's Paper), which he published from 1847 to 1860 in Rochester, New York.

During the Civil War Douglass became a consultant to President Abraham Lincoln advocating that former slaves be armed for the North and that the war be made a direct confrontation against slavery. After Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Union’s victory Douglass dedicated himself to securing his community’s rights to this new freedom. He strongly supported the 14^th Amendment, which granted Black people citizenship, but he realized that this new citizenship status needed to be protected by suffrage. He was a longtime supporter of women’s rights, but realizing a universal suffrage amendment would fail under Reconstruction politics, Douglass then supported Black male suffrage with the idea that Black men could help women secure the right to vote later.

Frederick Douglass held numerous government appointments; he was the first Black U.S. marshal in 1877 when he was appointed to that post for the District of Columbia by President Rutherford B. Hayes; in 1881 President Garfield appointed him to the high-paying position of recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia; President Harrison named Douglass  the U.S. minister resident and consul general to the Republic of Haiti in 1882.

During the later years of his life, Douglass remained committed to social justice and the African American community. Douglass was the most photographed American man in the 19th century and used those pictures as deliberate contradictions to the visual stereotypes of Black men and women at that time, which often exaggerated their facial features, skin color, and physical bodies and demeaned their intelligence. He served on Howard University’s board of trustees from 1871 to 1895.

Frederick Douglass died in his Cedar Hill home on February 20, 1895; a remarkable journey from slavery to free man to advisor to a president to icon.