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Frederick Douglass once told a group of African American students from a school in Talbot County, Maryland,"What was possible for me is possible for you. Do not think because you are colored you cannot accomplish anything. Strive earnestly to add to your knowledge. So long as you remain in ignorance, so long will you fail to command the respect of your fellow men."Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey to a slave mother and a white father he never knew, Frederick Douglass grew up to become a leader in the abolitionist movement and the first black citizen to hold high rank (as U.S. minister and consul general to Haiti) in the U.S. government.
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) was born a slave, but escaped North to freedom in 1838. He became a celebrated abolitionist speaker, and his speeches were widely circulated in print. Douglass used his lecture fees to aid fugitive slaves and headed the Rochester station of the underground railroad. One of the speeches in this pamphlet was delivered at a celebration of the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the West Indies on August 1, 1834. Before emancipation in the United States, West Indian emancipation day was widely celebrated by opponents of slavery. In the second speech, Douglass denounces the controversial Dred Scott decision of March 6, 1857, in which the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, denied Scott's claim that he was free because he had been taken into free territory and declared that no black could be a citizen under the Constitution.
From 1847 to 1863, escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) published the North Star with the aid of money and a press provided by British philanthropists. The paper was published in Rochester, New York. Douglass's goals were to "abolish slavery in all its forms and aspects, advocate UNIVERSAL EMANCIPATION, exalt the standard of public morality, and promote the moral and intellectual improvement of the COLORED PEOPLE, and hasten the day of FREEDOM to the Three Millions of our enslaved fellow countrymen." The paper also advanced women's rights, a cause that Douglass had championed since his participation in the first women's rights convention of 1848. Douglass also published another abolitionist paper, the Frederick Douglass Paper.
North Star
Quite unlike Josiah Henson, who resembled Uncle Tom, Frederick Douglass symbolizes the militant outlook of modern Negro leaders. A tall, vigorous mulatto, he had been born in Talbot County, Maryland, of a slave mother and an unknown white father. As his book shows, he was a sensitive man who greatly resented the frequent abuses of his condition. Yet he managed to learn how to read and write and to conspire successfully for freedom. He escaped in 1838, married a free colored woman in New York City, and moved to an abolitionist atmosphere at New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Then began his remarkable career as a devoted follower of Garrison and an influential orator and agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Like James Forten, the gifted grandfather of Charlotte Forten, he fought segregation as well as slavery. In 1845 he published the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglassand My Escape From Slaverywhich were subsequently greatly enlarged. After visiting England and Ireland, where he was lionized, he returned in 1847 with enough funds to publish his newspaper, North Star, which not only demanded immediate emancipation but also woman suffrage and other liberal causes. As a friend of John Brown, he narrowly escaped arrest for conspiracy and when the Civil War came, he helped to arouse the Union forces to the fact that abolition was the real issue. Lincoln counselled with him on race questions and postwar presidents rewarded him with various honors such as the ministership to Haiti.
It is symbolically significant that he died in 1895, the year that Booker T. Washingtondelivered his Atlanta Compromisespeech, urging patient conservative accommodation instead of Douglass' ideal of constant agitation for early social equality.
Frederick Douglass Speeches Excerpts
Frederick Douglass Appeal to Congress
The Meaning of July 4th For The Negro
Frederick Douglass on Reconstruction
Lewis Douglass
Charles Douglass
IN 1877, THE GREAT AFRICAN AMERICAN ORATOR AND WRITER FREDERICK DOUGLASS, WHO HAD SPENT MOST OF HIS LIFE FIGHTING FOR THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY AND FOR THE RIGHTS OF ALL INDIVIDUALS, TRAVELLED THROUGH NEW ENGLAND ON A SPEAKING TOUR. HE WAS INVITED BY VETERANS OF THE FIRST MAINE CAVALRY, A FAMOUS CIVIL WAR UNIT, TO JOIN THEM AT THEIR ANNUAL REUNION IN OLD ORCHARD BEACH. DOUGLASS IS STANDING FOURTH FROM RIGHT IN THE FIRST ROW. HE NOTED THAT IT WAS A SIGN OF GREAT PROGRESS IN RACE RELATIONS THAT HE HAD ENJOYED "A GAME OF CROQUET WITH LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF A DIFFERENT RACE RIGHT OUT IN FRONT OF THE HOTEL."
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