35TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION Super Hero FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Frederick Douglass 

The fight against slavery is best exemplified by the words and deeds of one man—Frederick Douglass. In the years that spanned the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the post-Reconstruction period, Douglass championed the cause of all oppressed people. The granite Douglass's preeminence as race leader was to persist until his death in 1895. That was the very year Booker T. Washington was thrust into the role of the nation's most famous Negro by his celebrated Atlanta Compromise address, "signaling a strategic retreat with a changed national attitude," wrote Richard Bardolph in his 1959 The Negro Vanguard.

Douglass was born in one of the darkest periods of slavery on a plantation owned by Colonel Lloyd of Talbot County, Maryland, the white man who raped Douglass's mother. When Douglass was an infant, he was taken from his mother and placed in his grandmother's care. According to Douglass, hunger was his constant companion. "He used to run races against the cat and the dog to reach the bones that were tossed out of the window, or to snap up the crumbs that fell under the table," said his biographer, J. A. Rogers, in 1947's World's Great Men of Color. Douglass would later be beaten for sneaking away to get meat. 

At age eight, two years after his mother died at a neighboring estate, young Douglass was sent to live with the Auld family, where his life's ambition to learn how to read was fulfilled. Not knowing it was against the law, Mrs. Auld gave him reading lessons. Her husband scolded her when he found out, causing her to stop her literacy crusade. Douglass continued his lessons on his own, grabbing scraps of newspapers, bank notes, or any piece of paper with writing on it to teach himself. 

After a life-altering physical confrontation with a "slave breaker," 21-year-old Douglass plotted his 1838 escape. He somehow acquired a sailor's uniform and a passport, climbed on a ship, and sailed away. He arrived in New York the next day and found work shoveling coal. He took on the last name of Douglass, after the hero in Sir Walter Scott's Marmion. He married a freed woman, Anna Murray, and increased his desire to help those still in bondage by reading The Liberator, published by the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Three years later, he found himself in front of a crowd speaking forcefully against slavery at an anti-slavery meeting in Nantucket. He had the uncanny ability to transport his audiences to Slave Row. Historian Lerone Bennett said, "He could make people laugh at a slave owner preaching the duties of Christian obedience; could make them see the humiliation of a Black maiden ravished by a brutal slave owner; could make them hear the sobs of a mother separated from her child. Through him, people could cry, curse and feel; through him they could live slavery." 

In 1845, he published his first autobiography, Narratives of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, which put slavers on his track after the book had huge sales and subsequent controversy. 

Douglass prepared to flee to England. On his getaway boat, he made a speech so fiery that Southerners nearly killed him by throwing him overboard. His life was saved by crew members. This event garnered huge publicity in England. Lords, ladies, and earls welcomed him to their suburban estates.

The now-famous baritone orator, with his impressive mane of hair, addressed the Parliament. After 19 months in Great Britain, English friends gave him $2,175, and he used $750 to buy his freedom. 

His liberty now purchased, Douglass went to Rochester, New York, and started his antislavery paper, The North Star, later renamed Frederick Douglass' Paper. He wrote his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, in 1855. He returned to this form 26 years later and wrote The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. 

The most important aspect of his writing is that it crystallized the abolition movement and mobilized both Blacks and whites to fight slavery. A secondary result of these stellar works was the stimulation of Black scholarship; they created an audience for slave narratives and Black literary and historical works. 

In his words and deeds, Douglass challenged liberals, who felt he should merely "stick to the facts" in his oratory and "leave the philosophy to them." He challenged conservatives who thought they were empowered by God to enslave Black people. And he fought both whites and Blacks who thought his terse verse did not fit into the commonly held notions of what a Black man should be and say. 

Douglass challenged himself and his people. In the process, he emerged as the African-American community's first national spokesperson. He taught everyone that freedom is never free—that it is born of and born in "earnest struggle."

From Great African Americans.  Copyright, Publications International, Ltd.