Frederick Douglass: Eloquent Orator, Champion of Human Rights

Born a slave in Maryland in 1818, Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Bailey) quickly proved that he was a man ahead of his time. Even as a kid, Douglass was precocious and quick to speak his mind. After the wife of the man who he served taught him the alphabet, he began secretly studying rhetoric and the speeches of famous orators. At the next plantation he worked, he would teach his fellow slaves how to read the New Testament on Sundays. Douglass fell in love with a free woman, Anna Murray, and in 1838, escaped slavery by boarding a train and heading North. Dressed in sailor clothes that Murray had given him, he arrived in New York City – a free state. “A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath, and the ‘quick round of blood,’ I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life,” Douglass later wrote.    

  After getting married and moving to Massachusetts where there was a thriving freed slave population he began telling his story to the community and soon became a well-known orator. In 1847, he started publishing his own newspaper called The North Star, whose motto was: “Right is of no Sex – Truth is of no Color – God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren.” He became an eloquent advocate not only for the abolition of slavery but also for the equality of everyone — immigrants, women, Native Americans — often citing the Constitution as a guiding and uniting force. The North Star was often where he’d speak on these issues. Douglass was the only Black man to attend the Seneca Falls Convention in New York, the first ever women’s rights convention. At the convention, many men opposed the idea of women’s suffrage but Douglass spoke up, saying he couldn’t accept the right to vote as a Black man if women couldn’t join him. After this, the resolution passed. “I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong,” Douglass once said.    

Happy Birthday 🖤🔥 to one of my GREATEST & most CHERISHED influences #FrederickDouglass the famed abolitionist and feminist who fought ferociously and intelligently to escape the institution of American chattel slavery and become one of the nation’s foremost moral thinkers, activists, writers and eventually politicians🤴🏾♥✊🏾🔥 (Painting: The Lion by @kadirnelson) “It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” #RIPower #FrederickDouglass #KadirNelson #BlackArtists #BlackHistoryMonth #BeTheChange #BlackExcellence ##BlackLivesMatter

A post shared by Agunda Okeyo (@agundaokeyo) on Feb 14, 2018 at 2:19pm PST

  He went on to write several influential books, including a well-known biography called Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. In 1895, shortly after receiving a standing ovation for delivering a speech at the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C., Douglass died at home of a heart attack. Douglass’ charisma and candor have lasted beyond his lifetime. Last year, a piece of bi-partisan legislation that authorized $130 million to go towards ending human trafficking was named after him — “Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Act of 2017.”