Born 1817
Tuckahoe, Maryland
Died 1895
Washington, D.C.
Escaped slave, abolitionist, orator, and author
Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery at the age of seventeen to become one of the most effective abolitionists and most celebrated speakers and authors in the United States. He founded the abolitionist weekly newspaper North Star. The newspaper’s office served as a way station on the Underground Railroad (the secret network through which slaves were assisted to freedom). Even after the emancipation of the slaves Douglass championed equal rights for African Americans and for women.
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Tuckahoe, Maryland, in 1817 (the exact date of his birth was not recorded). He knew his mother—a slave named Harriet Bailey—only briefly, as she was sold to another plantation when he was a baby. (At the time it was common for slaveholders to separate children from their mothers before the child’s first birthday.) Douglass never knew the identity of his father; he only knew that his father was a white man. His father was most likely his master, Captain Aaron Anthony.
Douglass lived with his grandparents, Betsey and Isaac Bailey, for his first seven years.
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