Narrative Of The Life Of Fredrick Douglass

The Life and Legacy of Fredrick Douglass
Beloved leader of black America, Fredrick Douglass was the most influential African American of his day. He was a pioneer of the anti-slavery movement, a dynamic speaker, statesman, and writer. His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), has been honored as one of the most important stories in African American history. Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, in 1818 (no one knows the exact date), he claimed even his own birthday as February 14th, as a sentiment for his mother who called him her “little Valentine” later and he also changed his last name to Douglass in honor the hero in Walter Scott's poem, "The Lady of the Lake." Douglass lived as
His life’s work and legacy live today. Douglass’s Narrative sold over 35 thousand copies in the United States and in Europe, and it also was translated into French and German. Following are a brief review of Douglass’s biography and how his life impacted Abolitionism—the Civil Rights Movement of the past. A conclusion will include how Douglass’a life can compare to the civil rights movements of today, specifically, Black Lives Matter.
Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in Maryland's to a slave named Harriet Bailey and a white father, whom he never knew. In his autobiography, Narrative, Douglass talks about the common practice of the rape of slave women by their owners, not only for sex, but to have more children to own as their property. Douglass’s first master, and probably his father, Captain Anthony, who
During his time in the South he was severely beaten for his resistance to slavery. In his early teens he began to teach in a Sunday school that was later forcibly shut down by hostile whites. Following his first botched attempt to escape, Douglass was sent to work in the Baltimore shipyards. Two years later, in 1838, disguised as a sailor and using a sailor's protection papers, Douglass escaped to New York. Once there, he married a free black woman and they settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and quickly became involved in the anti-slavery movement. The Abolitionists in America started the movement in the 1830s by forming the American Anti-Slavery Society. “The white abolitionist movement in the North was led by social reformers, especially William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society; writers such as John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Black activists included former slaves such as Frederick Douglass; and free blacks such as the brothers Charles Henry Langston and John Mercer Langston, who helped found the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society” (Abolitionism). Douglass quickly became a nationally recognized figure among the abolitionists. It was during this time that he published his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In the same year he went to England and Ireland, where he remained until 1847, speaking on slavery and women's rights. In 1846, his