The complete online text of Frederick Douglass by Charles W. Chesnutt.

Charles W. Chesnutt was the first important Afro-American writer of fiction to enlist the white-controlled publishing industry in the service of his social message, touching a significant portion of the white American reading audience with his indictment...

Charles Waddell Chesnutt, a "voluntary Negro" (one who, though so fair as to be mistaken for white, chooses not to "pass"), was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the eldest child of Andrew Jackson Chesnutt and the former Ann Maria Sampson, free blacks, who in 185...

Charles Waddell Chesnutt was America's first important black writer of fiction; no black American before him had created a sustained body of significant work. Since his life spanned nearly two halves of two different centuries, his writing reflects both...

Frederick Douglass is known for fiercely opposing slavery after running away from his Maryland owner, for championing equal rights and women's rights and for being a forceful speaker.But he spent much of his adult life as a journalist, first publishing a newspaper in Rochester, N.Y.,...

8:30 a.m. The Manhattan Institute will host conference celebrating the 20th anniversary of Allan Bloom's book, “The Closing of the American Mind” at the Princeton Club, 15 West 43rd Street. 9 a.m. Operation HOPE will open a new education and banking center in Harlem...

A defining moment had arrived for young Frederick Douglass.Before he would go on to fight for slavery's abolition and for human rights with his eloquent words, he was hired out at 15 to Edward Covey, a local Maryland farmer.Covey had a reputation for breaking the...

Railroad tracks dip into the harbor next to an old, square, brick building in this rapidly gentrifying post-industrial waterfront. The tracks enter the water by design, not decay. ...