Courting Racial Justice

President Harry Truman skirts Congress and uses the Justice Department ...


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Frederick Douglass

“I have no accurate knowledge of my age,” Frederick Douglass wrote. Probably he was born into slavery sometime around 1818 in Maryland. Not long after he escaped from slavery, Douglass was asked to speak of his experiences at an abolitionist meeting in Nantucket, Massachusetts. He made such a powerful impression that he was soon hired as a full-time lecturer by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He traveled the country, speaking alongside men like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and working in the Underground Railroad. By the time of the Civil War he had grown to be a national leader. Douglass became a prolific writer, publishing two other books of autobiography as well as lectures, editorials, and magazine articles. He died in 1895 in the District of Columbia, not far from his birthplace in Maryland.