In the American slave years, sitting on a rusty, dated chair, a black man busily scribbles down words on loose pieces of parchments. Peering at what he had written, one can decipher the chronicles of his life and the hardships he had suffered. This man lived twenty years as a slave and almost nine years as a fugitive slave. He received worldwide repute as an abolitionist, reformer, editor, orator, and the author of three autobiographies, from the 1840s to his death in 1895. He is Frederick Douglass, the most significant African American leader and intellectual of the 19th century.

Frederick Bailey (Douglass) was born into slavery on a Maryland plantation in February 1818. He had little knowledge of his birth mother, Harriet Bailey, and virtually no information of his father. "I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five times in my life; and...