Essay On Frederick Douglass

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Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was the most famous, influential African American known of his era. He was an abolitionist, public speaker, journalist, publisher, human rights and women's rights activist, author, and social reformer. He rose through purpose, wisdom, and eloquence to shape the American nation. Frederick Douglas devoted his life to achieving justice for all Americans, he anticipated America as a wide-ranging nation strengthened by diversity and free of discrimination. Douglass had a vision to live in a world that race and color shouldn’t matter, in a century that this was unrealistic. We must go back in the past of Douglas life and learn of his great accomplishments to how it shaped America today.
"Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey" was born in 1818 in Talbot County, on Maryland Eastern Shore, the son of a slave woman and an unknown white man (likelihood white slave master). He entered slavery from birth. Unaware of his actual date of birth, like most all the other slaves at that time, Douglass was forced to face the dismay of being a slave early in his life. Separated from his mother when only a few weeks old, he spent his early years with his grandparents and with an aunt, seeing his mother only four or five times before her death when he was seven. At this time he was exposed to the dreadful conditions of slavery, observing actual ruthless whippings and spending abundant time cold and hungry. Not being told by his grandmother that she was going to leave him, at the age of six she took him to the plantation of his master and left him there. Douglass never recuperated from the betrayal of the leaving. (“Frederick Douglass”)
When he was around the age of eight he was sent to Baltimore to live as a hous...

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...is first speech at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society's annual convention in Nantucket. While participating in an 1843 lecture tour through the Midwest, Douglass was beaten by an angry mob before being rescued by a local Quaker family. But the views of Garrison and Douglass ultimately diverged. Garrison denounced churches, political parties, even voting. He believed in the breakup of the Union. He also believed that the U.S. Constitution was a pro-slavery. After his tour of Europe, Douglass views began to change; he was becoming more of an independent thinker. In 1851 Douglass announced at a meeting in Syracuse, New York, that he didn’t assume the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. Douglass also did not advocate the dissolution of the Union, it would isolate slaves in the South. This led to a disagreement between Garrison and Douglass.(“Frederick Douglas”)

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