Frederick Douglass Human Rights Leader

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Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was an important human rights leader in the anti-slavery movement and the first African American citizen to hold a high U.S government rank. Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in to slavery in Talbot Country, Maryland 1818. The exact year and date of Douglass’s birth are unknown, though later in life he chose to celebrate in on February 14. Frederick Douglass lived with his grandmother. Douglass was selected to live in the home of the of the plantation owners, one of whom may have been his father. His mother died when he was only ten years old.
Frederick Douglass was eventually sent to the Baltimore home of Hugh Auld. It was there that Douglass first learn the skills that would made him to national celebrity. Defying a ban on teaching slaves to read and write, Auld’s wife …show more content…

Charles and Rosetta assisted their father in the production of his newspaper The North Star. Anna remained a loyal supporter of Frederick’s public work, despite marital strife caused by his relationships with several other women. After Anna’s death, Douglass married Helen Pitts, white feminist from Honeoye, New York. Pitts was the daughter of Gideon Pitts Jr., an abolitionist colleague. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Pitts worked on a radical feminist publication and shared many of Douglass’s moral principles. Their marriage caused considerable controversy, since Pitts was white and nearly twenty years younger than Douglass. Douglass’s children were especially displeased with the relationship.
Douglass and Pitts remained married until his death eleven years later. On February 20, 1895 he attended a meeting of the National Council of women in Washington, D.C. shortly after returning home, Frederick Douglass died of massive heart attack or stroke. He was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New

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    Furthermore, because he had a warmhearted owner, he was able to express himself through his work to many different people of his time. Douglass’s works and speeches remain of great impact, and continue to influence and inspire many people in literature to this day. He influenced many people during his travels to Northern free states and overseas to England and Ireland where he explained and changed their mindset of the cruelty of slavery, which ultimately lead to the adjustment by the people to understand the reality of slavery. Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in February of 1818 in Tuckahoe, Maryland to Harriet Bailey. Even though his single mother raised him, his biological father is believed to be one of his mother’s previous owners.

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  • Frederick Douglass Personification Essay

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    Frederick Douglass was an enslaved person and was born in Talbot County, Maryland. He had no knowledge of his accurate age like most of the enslaved people. He believed that his father was a white man, and he grew up with his grandmother. Douglass and his mother were separated when he was young, which was also common in the lives of the enslaved people. This concept of separation was used as a weapon to gain control of the enslaved people. In short, despite the obstacles he had to endure, he was able to gain an education and fight for his freedom in any means necessary.

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  • Frederick Douglas and Benjamin Franklin: Two Great Men

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    Frederick Douglass has an autobiography called “Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass” basically telling his life story. He starts off telling about how he grew up from a baby and tells about his family, the little that he knew. Douglass was born into slavery and separated from his mother before he was twelve months, to prevent a strong bond between them two. He did not know what his exact age was and he did not know who his father was, there were rumors that his master was his father. He soon evaded slavery and went to New York where he got married to another freed slave. In the 1840’s he got the Anti-Slavery movement some fuel when he told about his days as a slave and his experiences. After that he was appointed to be the speaker of the movement by Lloyd Garrison. His novel almost got him into some trouble because he was not legally freed so his master could still go find him and take him back. This caused him to have to get out of the United States for a little while. He did not like the idea of the underground railroad saying “I have never approved of the very public manner of the underground railroad” (Douglass 990). He thinks t...

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  • Analysis of Frederick Douglass, The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro

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    Boston: G.K. Hall, 1999. Foner, Philip S. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Volume II Pre-Civil War Decade. 1850 - 1860 -. NY: International Publishers Co., Inc., 1950.

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  • Dehumanization and Freedom in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

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    Frederick Douglass emphasizes the dehumanization aspect of slavery throughout his narrative. As is the general custom in slavery, Douglass is separated from his mother early in infancy and put under the care of his grandmother. He recalls having met his mother several times, but only during the night. She would make the trip from her farm twelve miles away just to spend a little time with her child. She dies when Douglass is about seven years old. He is withheld from seeing her in her illness, death, and burial. Having limited contact with her, the news of her death, at the time, is like a death of a stranger. Douglass also never really knew the identity of his father and conveys a feeling of emptiness and disgust when he writes, "the whisper that my master was my father, may or may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to my purpose" (Douglass, 40). Douglass points out that many slave children have their masters as their father. In these times, frequently the master would take advantage of female slaves and the children born to the slave w...

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    In Frederick Douglass' autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, he writes about the inhumanity and brutality of slavery, with the intention of informing white, American colonists. Douglass is thought to be one of the greatest leaders of the abolition, which radically and dramatically changed the American way of life, thus revolutionizing America. Douglass changed America, and accomplished this through writing simply and to the point about the "reality" of slavery, told through the point of view of a slave. In a preface of Douglass' autobiography, William Lloyd Garrison writes, "I am confident that it is essentially true in all its statements; that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination; that it comes short of reality, rather than overstates a single fact in regard to slavery as it is" (Douglass, 6). This statement authenticates and guarantees Douglass' words being nothing but the truth.

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  • Frederick Douglass and Slavery

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    Frederick Douglass's Narrative, first published in 1845, is an enlightening and incendiary text. Born into slavery, Douglass became the preeminent spokesman for his people during his life; his narrative is an unparalleled account of the inhumane effects of slavery and Douglass's own triumph over it. His use of vivid language depicts violence against slaves, his personal insights into the dynamics between slaves and slaveholders, and his naming of specific persons and places made his book an indictment against a society that continued to accept slavery as a social and economic institution. Like Douglass, Harriet Jacobs was born into slavery, and in 1853 she published Letter from a Fugitive Slave, now recognized as one of the most comprehensive antebellum slave narratives written by an African-American woman. Jacobs's account broke the silence on the exploitation of African American female slaves.

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  • Frederick Douglass

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    Frederick Douglass defined his manhood through his education and his freedom. As a slave he realized "the white man's power to enslave the black man".*(Narrative 273) That power was through mental and physical enslavement. Douglass knew that becoming literate would be "the pathway from slavery to freedom".*(275) His education would give him the mental freedom to then gain physical freedom. He became literate by bribing and befriending the neighborhood boys that lived around him. Every chance Douglass had, he would find another way to gain more knowledge to learn to read.

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  • Frederick Douglass Desire For Freedom

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    Frederick Douglass’ source, “The Desire for Freedom” was written in 1845. He was born into slavery in 1818 and became an important figure in the fight for abolition. Douglass was also involved in other reform movements such as the women’s rights movement. He “experienced slavery in all its variety, from work as a house servant and as a skilled craftsman in Baltimore shipyard to labor as a plantation field hand” (Pg.207¬). “The Desire for Freedom” was meant to document how his life was within slavery and how his education could someday help him escape it. Douglass meant to speak to American slaves and those who did not really understand slavery in order to help persuade everyone that life was meant to be lived freely. In order to obtain this future, Douglass wrote about his own personal experience and how he believed that enslavers were “in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and gone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery” (Pg. 208). This source brings on the idea that slaves were willing to fight back, wanted to be educated, and, most importantly, wanted the chance to live life freely.

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  • Frederick Douglass Research Paper

    763 Words  | 2 Pages

    First of all, the early life of Frederick Douglass was horrible and very difficult. He was born on February 1818 in Tuckahoe, Maryland. 7 His parents were from two different races. His father was white while his mother was a African American. At that time period slave auctions were held to sell black slaves to white land owners. It was at a slave auction that as a child Frederick Douglass was separated from his Negro mother. His mother was sold and Douglass never saw an inch of her again in his entire life.

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  • Great Civil Rights Activists, Frederick Douglass

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    The great civil rights activist Frederick Douglass was born into slavery on a Maryland Eastern Shore plantation in February 1818. His given name, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, seemed to portend an unusual life for this son of a field hand and a white man, most likely Douglass's first master, Captain Aaron Anthony. Perhaps Harriet Bailey gave her son such a distinguished name in the hope that his life would be better than hers. She could scarcely imagine that her son's life would continue to be a source of interest and inspiration nearly 190 years after his birth. Indeed, it would be hard to find anyone who more intimately embodies this year's Black History Month theme, "From Slavery to Freedom: Africans in the Americas." Like many in the nineteenth-century United States, Frederick Douglass escaped the horrors of slavery to enjoy a life of freedom, but his unique personality drive to achieve fairness for his race led him to devote his life to the abolition of slavery and the movement for black civil rights. His fiery oratory and astonishing achievements produced a heritage that stretches his influence across the centuries, making Frederick Douglass a role model for the twenty-first century. No doubt that the major turning point in Douglass’s life would be his fight with Covey

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  • Frederick Douglass Narrative

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    Mr. Frederick Douglass was born somewhere between 1817 and 1818, and right away became a slave. Him and his mother, Harriet Bailey, were separated right after his birth. Although he has not met his father, Frederick Douglass thinks that his father is Captain Anthony, a worker for Colonel Lloyd, the owner of hundreds of slaves. Working in plantation, or the Great House Farm as it was called, wasn’t as hard for Frederick. Due to his young age he works inside the household, instead of working in the fields like the rest of the slaves did. Somewhere around age of seven, he was given away to Captain Anthony’s relatives who live in Baltimore. There he starts to begin learning how to read and write with the help of Sophia Auld and local boys. While learning how to read and write, he starts noticing that slavery is bad and that in the North the slaves are free. After a couple years with Captain’s Anthony’s relatives, Frederick Douglass is given to Edward Convey, who is a very harsh man and the two of them even get into a fight. While being at Convey’s plantation Frederick Douglass learns the everyday life of a slave, which causes him to lose the interest of breaking out and becoming free, educated man. After a year in Convey’s, Frederick Douglass was moved to William Freeland’s plantation, where he ren...

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  • Frederick Douglass Meaning Of Freedom

    761 Words  | 2 Pages

    Frederick was born in Tuckahoe, Maryland in the year 1818, to Harriet Bailey and a white man. He did not know who his father was, and was separated from his mother at a young age. She would always make the effort to come visit her son, until she passed away. The death of his mother did not affect Douglass because there was a lack of familial connection between the two. The lack of a real mother-son relationship led to him not understanding what family felt like, until he comes into contact with his aunt Hester. His relationship with his aunt Hester essentially exposed him to the grim reality of slave mistreatment. One day, their master had caught Aunt Hester out with another slave, which resulted in Hester receiving a cruel and gruesome beating from him. Douglass had not known what the reality of inhumane slave treatment was until that day. This essentially led to Frederick having his first epiphany: that he is a slave and that his master would try to dehumanize him whenever the opportunity was presented to him. This is evident when Douglass states the slaves are subject to receiving limited supplies, lack of privacy and cruel whippings whenever their services were deemed to not be up to par (Douglass 14). Masters mistreated their slaves in order to make them feel inferior, which would prevent the slaves from lashing out and fighting for their equality. Yet a human can withstand so much suffering until they realize they deserve

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  • Frederick Douglass Autobiographies

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    Douglass wrote several autobiographies. He described his experiences as a slave in his lifetime autobiography, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, an American Slave, which became a bestseller and influential in supporting icon, as did the second, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). After the Civil War. Douglass was about twelve years old, some woman name Sophia started teaching him his abc’s although the state Maryland had a law that prohibited teaching slaves to read. Douglass described her as a kind and tender-hearted woman that gave her heart to who treated her with kindness boy the way one human being ought to treat another human being. During 1818 he lived with his grandmother her name was Betty Bailey When douglass was young he lived in a home on a plantation owners one of them was his father. His mother died with his was 10.

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