Frederick Douglass

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, around February 1818 — the exact date never recorded, because the enslaved were not counted as having birthdays. His mother Harriet Bailey was a field hand; his father was rumored to be his enslaver. He saw his mother only a handful of times before she died when he was seven.

He taught himself to read against the law. The wife of his enslaver had begun teaching him his letters; when her husband forbade it on the grounds that "learning would spoil the best slave in the world," Douglass understood — as he later wrote — that "the pathway from slavery to freedom" was literacy itself. He completed the lessons by trading bread with poor white children in exchange for words. He read the Columbian Orator until he could recite its speeches by heart.

He escaped slavery on September 3, 1838, by impersonating a free Black sailor and boarding a train north. He took the surname Douglass — drawn from a character in Walter Scott's Lady of the Lake — and began speaking publicly against slavery in 1841. The hostile claim of his time was that no formerly-enslaved man could possibly have written or spoken as well as he did. He answered with his autobiography. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, published in 1845, sold tens of thousands of copies and named the men who had enslaved him — a deliberate act of risk that forced him into exile in Britain and Ireland for two years until British abolitionists purchased his legal freedom.

He returned to the United States and founded The North Star, an abolitionist newspaper, in 1847. He became the most photographed American of the 19th century — more often than Lincoln — by deliberate political choice, because he understood image as politics and wanted Americans to see the dignified portrait of a Black man asserting his own existence. He met with Lincoln during the Civil War to argue for Black enlistment and immediate emancipation. After the war he held federal office: US Marshal for the District of Columbia, Recorder of Deeds for DC, and Consul-General to Haiti.

He never stopped working. He campaigned for women's suffrage alongside the early suffragists, walked out of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention to lend his name to Elizabeth Cady Stanton's then-controversial demand for the vote, and spoke publicly for the rights of Native Americans and Chinese immigrants. He died on February 20, 1895, in Washington DC, hours after delivering a speech at the National Council of Women.

His three autobiographies — the Narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom, and the Life and Times — are foundational texts of American letters. The phrase "If there is no struggle, there is no progress" is his. So is the test he set the country: that no nation could be free while any of its people were held in bondage.