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Watch it in English!

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Ethan Hawke stars as abolitionist John Brown in this series based on the novel. "Onion" is a fictional enslaved boy who becomes a member of Brown's family of abolitionist soldiers and finds ... Read all Ethan Hawke stars as abolitionist John Brown in this series based on the novel. "Onion" is a fictional enslaved boy who becomes a member of Brown's family of abolitionist soldiers and finds himself in the 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry. Ethan Hawke stars as abolitionist John Brown in this series based on the novel. "Onion" is a fictional enslaved boy who becomes a member of Brown's family of abolitionist soldiers and finds himself in the 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry.

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Ethan Hawke stars as abolitionist John Brown in this limited series based on the National Book Award-winning novel. The story is told from the point of view of "Onion," a fictional enslaved boy who becomes a member of Brown's motley family of abolitionist soldiers battling slavery in Kansas, and eventually finds himself in the famous 1859 Army depot raid at Harpers Ferry, an inciting incident of the Civil War. It's a humorous and dramatic tale of Antebellum America and the ever-changing roles of race, religion and gender in American society. - SHOWTIME

Crazily Entertaining and Easyily Likeable

Feels like the love child of 'Django Unchained' and 'Brother Where Art Thou'....... Great Show!!! I've watched Ethan Hawke seesaw between good and bad productions, good and bad performances over recent years, there is no question he is on the up swing in both regards in The Good Love Bird. Really refreshing and a fun watch.

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By what name was The Good Lord Bird (2020) officially released in Canada in English?

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The Good Lord Bird (TV Mini Series 2020) - IMDb

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The Good Lord Bird: Created by Ethan Hawke. With Ethan Hawke, Hubert Point-Du Jour, Beau Knapp, Nick Eversman. Ethan Hawke stars as abolitionist John Brown in this series based on the novel. "Onion" is a fictional enslaved boy who becomes a member of Brown's family of abolitionist soldiers and finds himself in the 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry.

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1939

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Won 1 Oscar. Another 16 wins & 24 nominations. See more awards "

Storyline

Two FBI agents investigating the murder of civil rights workers during the 60s seek to breach the conspiracy of silence in a small Southern town where segregation divides black and white. The younger agent trained in FBI school runs up against the small town ways of his former Sheriff partner. Written by Keith Loh <loh@sfu.ca>

Taglines:

1964. When America was at war with itself.

Details

Release Date:

27 January 1989 (USA)

Also Known As:

Three Lives for Mississippi

Box Office

Budget:

$15,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA:

$225,034, 11 December 1988

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$34,603,943

Company Credits

Technical Specs

See full technical specs "

Did You Know?

Goofs

When Mrs. Pell is in her living room watching the television game show 'To Tell the Truth', it appears to be well after dark outside. From 1959 until 1966, this half-hour program aired on CBS at 7:30 PM ET/6:30PM CT. During the summertime in Mississippi (when the film is set), it would still have been broad daylight outside while this program was being telecast. See more "

Quotes

Connections

Referenced in Rich Hall's the Dirty South (2010) See more "

Soundtracks

Walk on by Faith
Words and Music by James Cleveland
Performed by Lannie Spann McBride
See more "

User Reviews

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Won 1 Oscar. Another 16 wins & 24 nominations. See more awards " Two FBI agents investigating the murder of civil rights workers during the 60s seek to breach the conspiracy of silence in a small Southern town where segregation divides black and white.

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Top Rated Movies #200 | Won 3 Oscars. Another 237 wins & 333 nominations. See more awards "

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:

Storyline

Based on an incredible true story of one man's fight for survival and freedom. In the pre-Civil War United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery. Facing cruelty personified by a malevolent slave owner, as well as unexpected kindnesses, Solomon struggles not only to stay alive, but to retain his dignity. In the twelfth year of his unforgettable odyssey, Solomon's chance meeting with a Canadian abolitionist will forever alter his life. Written by Fox Searchlight

Taglines:

The extraordinary true story of Solomon Northup

Details

Release Date:

8 November 2013 (USA)

Also Known As:

Twelve Years a Slave

Box Office

Budget:

$20,000,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend USA:

$923,715, 20 October 2013

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$187,733,202

Company Credits

Technical Specs

See full technical specs "

Did You Know?

Trivia

Director Steve McQueen had been toying with the idea of writing a script about slavery, featuring a black man who had been born free and was later forced into slavery, but McQueen was struggling with the script until his wife found Solomon Northup's biography and gave it to him. Shocked that he had never heard of Northup before, he decided to adapt the book instead. See more "

Goofs

Platt's fiddling for the forced merriment, does not synchronize with the fiddle sound. See more "

Quotes

[first lines]
: Alright now, y'all fresh niggers. Y'all gonna be in the cuttin' gang.
See more "

Soundtracks

Apache Blessing Song
Written and Performed by Chesley Wilson
See more "

User Reviews

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Top Rated Movies #200 | Won 3 Oscars. Another 237 wins & 333 nominations. See more awards " Cast overview, first billed only: Based on an incredible true story of one man's fight for survival and freedom. In the pre-Civil War United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery.

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Original title: The Butler

As Cecil Gaines serves eight presidents during his tenure as a butler at the White House, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and other major events affect this man's life, family, and Ameri... Read all As Cecil Gaines serves eight presidents during his tenure as a butler at the White House, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and other major events affect this man's life, family, and American society. As Cecil Gaines serves eight presidents during his tenure as a butler at the White House, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and other major events affect this man's life, family, and American society.

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What is the Hindi language plot outline for Lee Daniels' The Butler (2013)?

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Lee Daniels' The Butler: Directed by Lee Daniels. With Forest Whitaker, David Banner, Michael Rainey Jr., LaJessie Smith. As Cecil Gaines serves eight presidents during his tenure as a butler at the White House, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and other major events affect this man's life, family, and American society.

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1958

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Louis Armstrong-Go Down Moses (Lyrics+Download)

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1965

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Quiz Musical Black Music séquence Songs of Freedom

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Enjoy this home-made Musical Quiz and try to spot who sings what !

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1966

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1968

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1980

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1994

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Norman Rockwell - The Problem We All Live With (1964)

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1997

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Oh Freedom! - The Golden Gospel Singers (Lyrics in Description)

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Directed by Taylor Hackford. With Jamie Foxx, Regina King, Kerry Washington, Clifton Powell. The story of the life and career of the legendary rhythm and blues musician Ray Charles, from his humble beginnings in the South, where he went blind at age seven, to his meteoric rise to stardom during the 1950s and 1960s.

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Mr Brainwash, Los Angeles

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Listen up folks!

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By John Steinbeck

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By John Steinbeck

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Read this extract from Muhammad Ali's autobiography

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2002

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Extracted from Billie Holiday's autobiography

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Southern Trees - Billie Holiday - Lady Sings the Blues

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Learn More About MLK and Malcolm X

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Who Killed Malcolm X? (TV Mini-Series 2019-2020) - IMDb

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With Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, Muhammad A. Aziz, Zak A. Kondo, David Garrow. Activist Abdur-Rahman Muhammad begins his own investigation into the perplexing details surrounding the assassination of civil rights leader Malcolm X.

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Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, c. March 1822 - March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and social activist. After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known collectively as the Underground Railroad. During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army. In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women's suffrage.

Born into slavery in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by enslavers as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight, intending to hit another slave, but hit her instead. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her to become devoutly religious.

In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, only to return to Maryland to rescue her family soon after. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other enslaved people to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Tubman (or " Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide escapees farther north into British North America (Canada), and helped newly freed people find work. Tubman met John Brown in 1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.

When the Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. For her guidance of the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than 700 enslaved people, she is widely credited as first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war. After the war, she retired to the family home on property she had purchased in 1859 in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the women's suffrage movement until illness overtook her, and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African Americans that she had helped to establish years earlier. She became an icon of courage and freedom.

Birth and family

Map of key locations in Tubman's life

Tubman was born Araminta "Minty" Ross to enslaved parents, Harriet ("Rit") Green and Ben Ross. Rit was enslaved by Mary Pattison Brodess (and later her son Edward). Ben was enslaved by Anthony Thompson, who became Mary Brodess's second husband, and who ran a large plantation near the Blackwater River in the Madison area of Dorchester County, Maryland.

As with many enslaved people in the United States, neither the exact year nor place of Tubman's birth is known. Tubman reported the year of her birth as 1825, while her death certificate lists 1815 and her gravestone lists 1820. Historian Kate Larson's 2004 biography of Tubman records the year as 1822, based on a midwife payment and several other historical documents, including her runaway advertisement. Based on Larson's work, more recent biographies have accepted March 1822 as the most likely timing of Tubman's birth.

Tubman's maternal grandmother, Modesty, arrived in the U.S. on a slave ship from Africa; no information is available about her other ancestors. As a child, Tubman was told that she seemed like an Ashanti person because of her character traits, though no evidence has been found to confirm or deny this lineage. Her mother, Rit (who may have had a white father), was a cook for the Brodess family. Her father, Ben, was a skilled woodsman who managed the timber work on Thompson's plantation. They married around 1808 and, according to court records, had nine children together: Linah, Mariah Ritty, Soph, Robert, Minty (Harriet), Ben, Rachel, Henry, and Moses.

Rit struggled to keep her family together as slavery threatened to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters (Linah, Mariah Ritty, and Soph), separating them from the family forever. When a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit's youngest son, Moses, she hid him for a month, aided by other enslaved people and freedmen in the community. At one point she confronted Brodess about the sale. Finally, Brodess and "the Georgia man" came toward the slave quarters to seize the child, where Rit told them, "You are after my son; but the first man that comes into my house, I will split his head open." Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale. Tubman's biographers agree that stories told about this event within the family influenced her belief in the possibilities of resistance.

Tubman's mother was assigned to "the big house" and had scarce time for her own family; consequently, as a child Tubman took care of a younger brother and baby, as was typical in large families. When she was five or six years old, Brodess hired her out as a nursemaid to a woman named "Miss Susan". Tubman was ordered to care for the baby and rock the cradle as it slept; when the baby woke up and cried, Tubman was whipped. She later recounted a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried the scars for the rest of her life. She found ways to resist, such as running away for five days, wearing layers of clothing as protection against beatings, and fighting back.

Also in her childhood, Tubman was sent to work for a planter named James Cook. She had to check his muskrat traps in nearby marshes, even after contracting measles. She became so ill that Cook sent her back to Brodess, where her mother nursed her back to health. Brodess then hired her out again. She spoke later of her acute childhood homesickness, comparing herself to "the boy on the Swanee River", an allusion to Stephen Foster's song " Old Folks at Home". As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned to field and forest work, driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.

As an adolescent, Tubman suffered a severe head injury when an overseer threw a two-pound (1 kg) metal weight at another slave who was attempting to flee. The weight struck Tubman instead, which she said: "broke my skull". Bleeding and unconscious, she was returned to her enslaver's house and laid on the seat of a loom, where she remained without medical care for two days. After this incident, Tubman frequently experienced extremely painful headaches. She also began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings while appearing to be asleep. Larson suggests she may have had temporal lobe epilepsy, possibly as a result of brain injury; Clinton suggests her condition may have been narcolepsy or cataplexy. A definitive diagnosis is not possible due to lack of contemporary medical evidence, but this condition remained with her for the rest of her life.

After her injury, Tubman began experiencing visions and vivid dreams, which she interpreted as revelations from God. These spiritual experiences had a profound effect on Tubman's personality and she acquired a passionate faith in God. Although Tubman was illiterate, she was told Bible stories by her mother and likely attended a Methodist church with her family. She rejected the teachings of white preachers who urged enslaved people to be passive and obedient victims to those who trafficked and enslaved them; instead she found guidance in the Old Testament tales of deliverance. This religious perspective informed her actions throughout her life.

Family and marriage

Anthony Thompson promised to manumit Tubman's father at age 45. After Thompson died, his son followed through with that promise in 1840. Tubman's father continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family. Later in the 1840s, Tubman paid a white attorney five dollars (equivalent to $160 in 2022) to investigate the legal status of her mother, Rit. The lawyer discovered that Atthow Pattison, the grandfather of Mary Brodess, indicated in his will that Rit and any of her children would be manumitted at age 45, and that any children born after she reached age 45 would be freeborn. The Pattison and Brodess families ignored this stipulation when they inherited the enslaved family, but taking legal action to enforce it was an impossible task for Tubman.

Around 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated because of her enslaved status. The mother's status dictated that of children, and any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. Such blended marriages - free people of color marrying enslaved people - were not uncommon on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where by this time, half the black population was free. Most African-American families had both free and enslaved members. Larson suggests that they might have planned to buy Tubman's freedom.

Tubman changed her name from Araminta to Harriet soon after her marriage, though the exact timing is unclear. Larson suggests this happened right after the wedding, and Clinton suggests that it coincided with Tubman's plans to escape from slavery. She adopted her mother's name, possibly as part of a religious conversion, or to honor another relative.

Escape from slavery

Notice offering a reward of US$100 (equivalent to $3,520 in 2022) for the capture and return of "Minty" (Harriet Tubman) and her brothers Henry and Ben

In 1849, Tubman became ill again, which diminished her value to slave traders. Edward Brodess tried to sell her, but could not find a buyer. Angry at him for trying to sell her and for continuing to enslave her relatives, Tubman began to pray for God to make Brodess change his ways. She said later: "I prayed all night long for my master till the first of March; and all the time he was bringing people to look at me, and trying to sell me." When it appeared as though a sale was being concluded, Tubman changed her prayer: "First of March I began to pray, 'Oh Lord, if you ain't never going to change that man's heart, kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way'." A week later, Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier sentiments.

As in many estate settlements, Brodess's death increased the likelihood that Tubman would be sold and her family broken apart. His widow, Eliza, began working to sell the family's enslaved people. Tubman refused to wait for the Brodess family to decide her fate, despite her husband's efforts to dissuade her. "[T]here was one of two things I had a right to", she explained later, "liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other".

Tubman and her brothers, Ben and Henry, escaped from slavery on September 17, 1849. Tubman had been hired out to Anthony Thompson (the son of her father's former owner), who owned a large plantation in an area called Poplar Neck in neighboring Caroline County; it is likely her brothers labored for Thompson as well. Because they were hired out, Eliza Brodess probably did not recognize their absence as an escape attempt for some time. Two weeks later, she posted a runaway notice in the Cambridge Democrat, offering a reward of up to US$100 each (equivalent to $3,520 in 2022) for their capture and return to slavery. Once they had left, Tubman's brothers had second thoughts. Ben may have regretted leaving his wife and children. The two men went back, forcing Tubman to return with them.

Sometime in October or November, Tubman escaped again, this time without her brothers. Before leaving she sang a farewell song to hint at her intentions, which she hoped would be understood by Mary, a trusted fellow slave: "I'll meet you in the morning", she intoned, "I'm bound for the promised land." While her exact route is unknown, Tubman made use of the network known as the Underground Railroad. This informal system was composed of free and enslaved black people, white abolitionists, and other activists. Most prominent among the latter in Maryland at the time were Quakers (members of the Religious Society of Friends). The Preston area near Poplar Neck contained a substantial Quaker community and was probably an important first stop during Tubman's escape. From there, she probably took a common route for people fleeing slavery - northeast along the Choptank River, through Delaware, and then north into Pennsylvania. A journey of nearly 90 miles (145 km) by foot would have taken between five days and three weeks.

Tubman had to travel by night, guided by the North Star and trying to avoid slave catchers eager to collect rewards for fugitive slaves. The "conductors" in the Underground Railroad used deceptions for protection. At an early stop, the lady of the house instructed Tubman to sweep the yard so as to seem to be working for the family. When night fell, the family hid her in a cart and took her to the next friendly house. Given her familiarity with the woods and marshes of the region, Tubman likely hid in these locales during the day. The particulars of her first journey are unknown; because other escapees from slavery used the routes, Tubman did not discuss them until later in life. She crossed into Pennsylvania with a feeling of relief and awe, and recalled the experience years later:

When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.

Nicknamed "Moses"

Tubman sitting (1868 or 1869)

After reaching Philadelphia, Tubman thought of her family. "I was a stranger in a strange land," she said later. "[M]y father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were [in Maryland]. But I was free, and they should be free." While Tubman saved money from working odd jobs in Philadelphia and Cape May, New Jersey, the U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced law enforcement officials to assist in the capture of escaped slaves - even in states that had outlawed slavery - and heavily punished abetting escape. The law increased risks for those who had escaped slavery, more of whom therefore sought refuge in Southern Ontario, where slavery had been abolished. Racial tensions were also increasing in Philadelphia as poor Irish immigrants competed with free blacks for work.

In December 1850, Tubman was warned that her niece Kessiah and Kessiah's children would soon be sold in Cambridge. Tubman went to Baltimore, where her brother-in-law Tom Tubman hid her until the sale. Kessiah's husband, a free black man named John Bowley, made the winning bid for his wife. While the auctioneer stepped away to have lunch, John, Kessiah and their children escaped to a nearby safe house. When night fell, Bowley sailed the family on a log canoe 60 miles (97 kilometres) to Baltimore, where they met with Tubman, who brought the family to Philadelphia.

Early next year she returned to Maryland to guide away other family members. During her second trip, she recovered her youngest brother, Moses, along with two other men. Word of her exploits had encouraged her family, and she became more confident with each trip to Maryland.

In late 1851, Tubman returned to Dorchester County for the first time since her escape, this time to find her husband John. When she arrived there, she learned that John had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was happy where he was. Suppressing her anger, she found some enslaved people who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia.

Frederick Douglass worked for slavery's abolition alongside Tubman.

Because the Fugitive Slave Law had made the northern United States a more dangerous place for those escaping slavery to remain, many escapees began migrating to Southern Ontario. In December 1851, Tubman guided an unidentified group of 11 escapees, possibly including the Bowleys and several others she had helped rescue earlier, northward. There is evidence to suggest that Tubman and her group stopped at the home of abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass. Douglass and Tubman admired one another greatly as they both struggled against slavery. Years later he contrasted his efforts with hers, writing:

Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day - you in the night. ... The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown - of sacred memory - I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.

From 1851 to 1862, Tubman returned repeatedly to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rescuing some 70 slaves in about 13 expeditions, including her other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children. She also provided specific instructions to 50 to 60 additional enslaved people who escaped. Because of her efforts, she was nicknamed "Moses", alluding to the biblical prophet who led the Hebrews to freedom from Egypt. One of her last missions into Maryland was to retrieve her aging parents. Her father purchased her mother from Eliza Brodess in 1855, but even when they were both free, the area was hostile. In 1857, Tubman received word that her father was at risk of arrest for harboring a group of eight people escaping slavery. She led her parents north to St. Catharines, Canada, where a community of formerly enslaved people, including other relatives and friends of Tubman, had gathered.

Routes and methods

Tubman's dangerous work required ingenuity. She usually worked during winter, when long nights and cold weather minimized the chance of being seen. She would start the escapes on Saturday evenings, since newspapers would not print runaway notices until Monday morning. She used subterfuges to avoid detection. Tubman once disguised herself with a bonnet and carried two live chickens to give the appearance of running errands. Suddenly finding herself walking toward a former enslaver, she yanked the strings holding the birds' legs, and their agitation allowed her to avoid eye contact. Later she recognized a fellow train passenger as a former enslaver; she snatched a nearby newspaper and pretended to read. Tubman was known to be illiterate, and the man ignored her.

In an 1897 interview with historian Wilbur Siebert, Tubman named some people who helped her and places she stayed along the Underground Railroad. She stayed with Sam Green, a free black minister living in East New Market, Maryland; she also hid near her parents' home at Poplar Neck. She would travel from there northeast to Sandtown and Willow Grove, Delaware, and to the Camden area where free black agents, William and Nat Brinkley and Abraham Gibbs, guided her north past Dover, Smyrna, and Blackbird, where other agents would take her across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to New Castle and Wilmington. In Wilmington, Quaker Thomas Garrett would secure transportation to William Still's office or the homes of other Underground Railroad operators in the greater Philadelphia area. Still is credited with helping hundreds escape to safer places in New York, New England, and Southern Ontario.

Tubman's faith was another important resource as she ventured repeatedly into Maryland. The visions from her childhood head injury continued, and she saw them as divine premonitions. She spoke of "consulting with God", and trusted that He would keep her safe. Garrett once said of her, "I never met with any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God, as spoken direct to her soul." Her faith also provided immediate assistance. She used spirituals as coded messages, warning fellow travelers of danger or to signal a clear path. She sang versions of " Go Down Moses" and changed the lyrics to indicate that it was either safe or too dangerous to proceed. As she led escapees across the border, she would call out, "Glory to God and Jesus, too. One more soul is safe!"

She carried a revolver as protection from slave catchers and their dogs. Tubman also threatened to shoot anyone who tried to turn back since that would risk the safety of the remaining group, as well as anyone who helped them on the way. Tubman spoke of one man who insisted he was going to go back to the plantation. She pointed the gun at his head and said, "Go on or die." Several days later, the man who wavered crossed into Canada with the rest of the group.

By the late 1850s, Eastern Shore slaveholders were holding public meetings about the large number of escapes in the area; they cast suspicion on free blacks and white abolitionists. They did not know that "Minty", the petite, disabled woman who had run away years before, was responsible for freeing so many enslaved people. Though a popular legend persists about a reward of $40,000 (equivalent to $1,303,000 in 2022) for Tubman's capture, this is a manufactured figure: in 1867, in support of Tubman's claim for a military pension, an abolitionist named Sallie Holley wrote that $40,000 "was not too great a reward for Maryland slaveholders to offer for her". If it were real, such a high reward would have garnered national attention. A reward of $12,000 has also been claimed, though no documentation has been found for either figure.

Tubman and the fugitives she assisted were never captured. Years later, she told an audience: "I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say - I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger."

John Brown and Harpers Ferry

Tubman helped John Brown plan and recruit for the raid at Harpers Ferry.

In April 1858, Tubman was introduced to the abolitionist John Brown, an insurgent who advocated the use of violence to destroy slavery in the United States. Although she was not previously involved in armed insurrection, she agreed with his course of direct action and supported his goals. Like Tubman, he spoke of being called by God, and trusted the divine to protect him from the wrath of slavers. She, meanwhile, claimed to have had a prophetic vision of meeting Brown before their encounter.

Thus, as he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders, Brown was joined by "General Tubman", as he called her. Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Although other abolitionists like Douglass did not endorse his tactics, Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for those freed from slavery, and made preparations for military action. He believed that after he began the first battle, the enslaved would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the slave states. He asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in Southern Ontario who might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.

On May 8, 1858, Brown held a meeting in Chatham, Canada, where he unveiled his plan for a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. When word of the plan was leaked to the government, Brown put the scheme on hold and began raising funds for its eventual resumption. Tubman aided him in this effort and with more detailed plans for the assault.

Tubman was busy during this time, giving talks to abolitionist audiences and tending to her relatives. In early October 1859, as Brown and his men prepared to launch the attack, Tubman was ill in New Bedford, Massachusetts. It is not known whether she still intended to join Brown's raid or if she had become skeptical of the plan, but when the raid on Harpers Ferry took place on October 16, Tubman had recovered from her illness and was in New York City.

The raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason, murder, and inciting a rebellion, and he was hanged on December 2. His actions were seen by many abolitionists as a symbol of proud resistance, carried out by a noble martyr. Tubman herself was effusive with praise. She later told a friend: "[H]e done more in dying, than 100 men would in living."

Auburn and Margaret

In early 1859, Frances Adeline Seward, the wife of abolitionist Republican U.S. Senator William H. Seward, sold Tubman a seven-acre (2.8 ha) farm in Fleming, New York, for $1,200 (equivalent to $42,200 in 2022). The adjacent city of Auburn was a hotbed of antislavery activism, and Tubman took the opportunity to move her parents from Canada back to the U.S. Her farmstead became a haven for Tubman's family and friends. For years, she took in relatives and boarders, offering a safe place for black Americans seeking a better life in the north.

Shortly after acquiring the farm, Tubman went back to Maryland and returned with an eight-year-old light-skinned black girl named Margaret, who Tubman said was her niece. She also indicated the girl's parents were free blacks. According to Margaret's daughter Alice, Margaret later described her childhood home as prosperous and said that she left behind a twin brother. These descriptions conflict with what is known about the families of Tubman's siblings, which created uncertainty among historians about the relationship and Tubman's motivations. Alice called Tubman's actions a "kidnapping", saying, "she had taken the child from a sheltered good home to a place where there was nobody to care for her". After speculating in her 2004 biography of Tubman that Margaret might have been Tubman's own secret daughter, Kate Larson found evidence that Margaret was the daughter of Isaac and Mary Woolford, a free black couple who were neighbors of Tubman's parents in Maryland and who had twins named James and Margaret.

In November 1860, Tubman conducted her last rescue mission. Throughout the 1850s, Tubman had been unable to effect the escape of her sister Rachel, and Rachel's two children Ben and Angerine. Upon returning to Dorchester County, Tubman discovered that Rachel had died, and the children could be rescued only if she could pay a bribe of $30 (equivalent to $980 in 2022). She did not have the money, so the children remained enslaved. Their fates remain unknown. Never one to waste a trip, Tubman gathered another group, including the Ennalls family, ready and willing to take the risks of the journey north. It took them weeks to get away safely because of slave catchers forcing them to hide out longer than expected. The weather was unseasonably cold and they had little food. The Ennalls' infant child was quieted with paregoric while slave patrols rode by. They safely reached the home of David and Martha Wright in Auburn on December 28, 1860.

American Civil War

A woodcut of Tubman in her Civil War clothing

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Tubman had a vision that the war would soon lead to the abolition of slavery. More immediately, enslaved people near Union positions began began escaping in large numbers. General Benjamin Butler declared these escapees to be " contraband" - property seized by northern forces - and put them to work, initially without pay, at Fort Monroe in Virginia. The number of "contrabands" encamped at Fort Monroe and other Union positions rapidly increased. In January 1862, Tubman volunteered to support the Union cause and began helping refugees in the camps, particularly in Port Royal, South Carolina.

In South Carolina, Tubman met General David Hunter, a strong supporter of abolition. He declared all of the "contrabands" in the Port Royal district free, and began gathering formerly enslaved people for a regiment of black soldiers. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was not yet prepared to enforce emancipation on the southern states and reprimanded Hunter for his actions. Tubman condemned Lincoln's response and his general unwillingness to consider ending slavery in the U.S., for both moral and practical reasons:

God won't let master Lincoln beat the South till he does the right thing. Master Lincoln, he's a great man, and I am a poor negro; but the negro can tell master Lincoln how to save the money and the young men. He can do it by setting the negro free.

Tubman served as a nurse in Port Royal, preparing remedies from local plants and aiding soldiers suffering from dysentery and infectious diseases. At first, she received government rations for her work, but to dispel a perception that she was getting special treatment, she gave up her right to these supplies and made money selling pies and root beer, which she made in the evenings.

Scouting and the Combahee River Raid

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Tubman considered it a positive but incomplete step toward the goal of liberating all black people from slavery. She turned her own efforts towards more direct actions to defeat the Confederacy. In early 1863, Tubman used her knowledge of covert travel and subterfuge to lead a band of scouts through the land around Port Royal. Her group, working under the orders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, mapped the unfamiliar terrain and reconnoitered its inhabitants. She later worked alongside Colonel James Montgomery, and provided him with key intelligence that aided in the capture of Jacksonville, Florida.

Illustration of the Combahee River Raid from Harper's Weekly

Later that year, Tubman's intelligence gathering played a key role in the raid at Combahee Ferry. She guided three steamboats with black soldiers under Montgomery's command past mines on the Combahee River to assault several plantations. Once ashore, the Union troops set fire to the plantations, destroying infrastructure and seizing thousands of dollars worth of food and supplies. Forewarned of the raid by Tubman's spy network, enslaved people throughout the area heard steamboats' whistles and understood that they were being liberated. Tubman watched as those fleeing slavery stampeded toward the boats; she later described a scene of chaos with women carrying still-steaming pots of rice, pigs squealing in bags slung over shoulders, and babies hanging around their parents' necks. Armed overseers tried to stop the mass escape, but their efforts were nearly useless in the tumult. As Confederate troops raced to the scene, the steamboats took off toward Beaufort with more than 750 formerly enslaved people.

Newspapers heralded Tubman's "patriotism, sagacity, energy, [and] ability" in the raid, and she was praised for her recruiting efforts - more than 100 of the newly liberated men joined the Union army. Reports about her involvement in the raid led to a revival of the "General Tubman" appellation previously given to her by John Brown. Although her contributions have sometimes been exaggerated, her role in the raid led to her being widely credited as the first woman to lead U.S. troops in an armed assault.

In July 1863, Tubman worked with Colonel Robert Gould Shaw at the assault on Fort Wagner, reportedly serving him his last meal. She later described the battle to historian Albert Bushnell Hart:

And then we saw the lightning, and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder, and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.

For two more years, Tubman worked for the Union forces, tending to newly liberated people, scouting into Confederate territory, and nursing wounded soldiers in Virginia, a task she continued for several months after the Confederacy surrendered in April 1865.

Formal portrait of Tubman taken after the Civil War and circulated as a carte de visite

Tubman had received little pay for her Union military service. She was not a regular soldier and was only occasionally compensated for her work as a spy and scout; her work as a nurse was entirely unpaid. For over three years of service, she received a total of $200 (equivalent to $3,820 in 2022). Her unofficial status caused great difficulty in documenting her service, and the U.S. government was slow in recognizing its debt to her. Meanwhile, her humanitarian work for her family and the formerly enslaved kept her in a state of constant poverty.

When a promised appointment to an official military nursing position fell through in July 1865, Tubman decided to return to her home in New York. During a train ride to New York in October 1865, Tubman traveled on a half-fare ticket provided to her because of her service. A conductor told her to move from a regular passenger car into the less-desirable smoking car. When she refused, he cursed at her and grabbed her. She resisted, and he summoned additional men for help. They muscled her into the smoking car, injuring her in the process. As these events transpired, white passengers cursed Tubman and told the conductor to kick her off the train.

Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. In addition to managing her farm, she took in boarders and worked various jobs to pay the bills and support her elderly parents. One of the people Tubman took in was a farmer named Nelson Davis. Born enslaved in North Carolina, he had served as a private in the 8th United States Colored Infantry Regiment from September 1863 to November 1865. He began working in Auburn as a bricklayer, and they soon fell in love. Though he was 22 years younger than she was, on March 18, 1869, they were married at the Central Presbyterian Church. They adopted a baby girl named Gertie in 1874.

Tubman in 1887 (far left), with her husband Davis (seated, with cane), their adopted daughter Gertie (beside Tubman), Lee Cheney, John "Pop" Alexander, Walter Green, "Blind Aunty" Sarah Parker, and her great-niece Dora Stewart at Tubman's home in Auburn, New York

Tubman's friends and supporters from the days of abolition, meanwhile, raised funds to support her. One admirer, Sarah Hopkins Bradford, wrote an authorized biography entitled Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman. The 132-page volume was published in 1869 and brought Tubman some $1,200 in income (equivalent to $26,400 in 2022). Even with this assistance, paying off the mortgage on her farm in May 1873 exhausted Tubman's savings. That October, she fell prey to swindlers. Two black men claimed to know a former slave who had a trunk of gold coins smuggled out of South Carolina, which they would sell for cash at less than half the coins' value. She knew white people in the South had buried valuables when Union forces threatened the region, and black men were frequently assigned to digging duties, so the claim seemed plausible to her. She borrowed money from a wealthy friend and arranged to receive the gold late one night. Once the men had lured her into the woods, they knocked her out with chloroform and stole her purse. Tubman was found dazed and injured; the trunk was filled with rocks.

The crime brought new attention from local leaders to Tubman's precarious financial state and spurred renewed efforts to get compensation for her Civil War service. In 1874, Representatives Clinton D. MacDougall of New York and Gerry W. Hazelton of Wisconsin introduced a bill to pay Tubman a $2,000 (~$51,729 in 2022) lump sum "for services rendered by her to the Union Army as scout, nurse, and spy", but it was defeated in the Senate. In February 1880, Tubman's wood-framed house burned down, but with the help of her supporters it was quickly replaced with a new brick home.

Nelson Davis died of tuberculosis on October 14, 1888. The Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890 made Tubman eligible for a pension as his widow. After she documented her marriage and her husband's service record to the satisfaction of the Bureau of Pensions, in 1895 Tubman was granted a monthly widow's pension of $8 (equivalent to $281 in 2022), plus a lump sum of $500 to cover the five-year delay in approval. In December 1897, New York Congressman Sereno E. Payne introduced a bill to grant Tubman a soldier's monthly pension of $25 (~$879.00 in 2022). Although Congress received documents and letters to support Tubman's claims, some members objected to a woman being paid a full soldier's pension. In February 1899, Congress approved a compromise amount of $20 per (~$704.00 in 2022) month (the $8 from her widow's pension plus $12 for her service as a nurse), but did not acknowledge her as a scout and spy.

Suffragist activism

Tubman in 1911

In her later years, Tubman worked to promote the cause of women's suffrage. A white woman once asked Tubman whether she believed women ought to have the vote, and received the reply: "I suffered enough to believe it." Tubman began attending meetings of suffragist organizations, and was soon working alongside women such as Susan B. Anthony and Emily Howland.

Tubman traveled to New York, Boston and Washington, D.C. to speak in favor of women's voting rights. She described her actions during and after the Civil War, and used the sacrifices of countless women throughout modern history as evidence of women's equality to men. When the National Federation of Afro-American Women was founded in 1896, Tubman was the keynote speaker at its first meeting.

This wave of activism kindled a new wave of admiration for Tubman among the press in the United States. A publication called The Woman's Era launched a series of articles on "Eminent Women" with a profile of Tubman. An 1897 suffragist newspaper reported a series of receptions in Boston honoring Tubman and her lifetime of service to the nation. However, her endless contributions to others had left her in poverty, and she had to sell a cow to buy a train ticket to these celebrations.

Church, illness, and death

In the 1870s, Tubman became active in the Thompson Memorial African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church in Auburn. In 1895, she began discussions with AME Zion leaders and others to create a Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged that would care for "indigent colored people". Despite her financial limitations, in 1896 Tubman bid $1215 (~$42,739 in 2022) at auction for a 25-acre (10 ha) farm adjacent to the one she already owned, to use for the new facility. She designated one of the farm's buildings as its primary residence and named it "John Brown Hall" to honor her late abolitionist ally. However, raising funds for the project was difficult, and attempts to donate the property were complicated by the multiple mortgage loans used to pay for it. After Tubman almost lost the property due her financial difficulties, AME Zion agreed to take it over in 1903.

The home did not open for another five years, and Tubman was dismayed when the church ordered residents to pay a $100 entrance fee (equivalent to $3,260 in 2022). She said: "[T]hey make a rule that nobody should come in without they have a hundred dollars. Now I wanted to make a rule that nobody should come in unless they didn't have no money at all." She was frustrated by the new rule but was the guest of honor nonetheless when the home celebrated its opening on June 23, 1908.

As Tubman aged, her childhood head trauma continued to trouble her. Unable to sleep because of pain and "buzzing" in her head, in the late 1890s she asked a doctor at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital to operate. In her words, he "sawed open my skull, and raised it up, and now it feels more comfortable". She reportedly received no anesthesia and instead bit down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.

By 1911, Tubman's body was so frail that she was admitted into the rest home named in her honor. A New York newspaper described her as "ill and penniless", prompting supporters to offer a new round of donations. Surrounded by friends and family members, she died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913. Just before she died, she quoted the Gospel of John to those in the room: "I go away to prepare a place for you." Tubman was buried with semi-military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn.

Tubman's great-niece, Eva Stewart Northrup, launching the SS Harriet Tubman

Widely known and well-respected while she was alive, Tubman became an American icon in the years after she died. By the 1980s, Tubman was one of American history's most famous figures. She inspired generations of African Americans struggling for equality and civil rights; she was praised by leaders across the political spectrum.

Parks, monuments and historical sites

National parks and national monuments related to Tubman in the United States are the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument and the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park, both in Maryland, and the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn. The Salem Chapel in St. Catharines, where Tubman worshipped, is a National Historic Site of Canada.

The city of Auburn has several historical sites related to Tubman, including her gravesite. Other state and local historical sites about Tubman include a state park and memorial garden in Maryland, and a museum in New Jersey.

Artistic portrayals

Tubman is the subject of many works of art. Musicians including Woody Guthrie, Wynton Marsalis, and Walter Robinson have written songs celebrating her. She is the subject of operas by Thea Musgrave, Nkeiru Okoye, and Hilda Paredes, as well as plays by Carolyn Gage and a collaboration of May Miller and Willis Richardson. Tubman is the focus of novels by Elizabeth Cobbs, Marcy Heidish, and Anne Parrish, and is a character in novels by Terry Bisson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and James McBride.

Since Tubman's life was first dramatized on television in a 1963 episode of the series The Great Adventure, she has been portrayed in TV productions such as The Good Lord Bird, , Underground, and A Woman Called Moses. Cynthia Erivo received an Academy Award nomination for portraying Tubman in the 2019 theatrical film .

Artists including Fern Cunningham, Jane DeDecker, Nina Cooke John, and Alison Saar have presented Tubman in sculptures. She has been drawn or painted by numerous artists, including Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, William Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, and Faith Ringgold.

Other honors and commemorations

Official $20 bill prototype

In 1978, Tubman became the first African-American woman honored on a U.S. postage stamp; she appeared on a second stamp in 1995. Beginning in 2016, there have been plans to add a portrait of Tubman to the front of the twenty-dollar bill, moving the portrait of President Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder, to the back of the bill.

Dozens of schools, streets and highways, church groups, social organizations, and government agencies have been named after Tubman. In 1944, the United States Maritime Commission launched the SS Harriet Tubman, its first Liberty ship named for a black woman.

Historiography

Tubman hoped to become literate and write her own memoirs, but she never did. Instead, Sarah Hopkins Bradford combined Tubman's personal recollections, journalistic accounts, and letters from Tubman's friends and supporters to create Scenes from the Life of Harriet Tubman in 1868. Criticized by modern biographers for its artistic license and highly subjective point of view, the book nevertheless provides insight into Tubman's own view of her experiences. In 1886, Bradford released a re-written volume called Harriet, the Moses of her People. In both volumes Harriet Tubman is hailed as a latter-day Joan of Arc. The revision took a more moralistic and literary tone than the prior work, including changes of many event descriptions from first to third person. A final revision in 1901 added an appendix with more stories about Tubman's life.

The first full biography of Tubman to be published after Bradford's was Earl Conrad's Harriet Tubman (1943). Conrad experienced great difficulty in finding a publisher - the search took four years - and endured disdain and contempt for his efforts to construct a more objective, detailed account of Tubman's life for adults. Several highly dramatized versions of Tubman's life had been written for children, and many more came later, but Conrad wrote in an academic style. Though she was a popular historical figure, another book-length biography based on original scholarship did not appear for 60 years, when Jean Humez published a close reading of Tubman's life stories in 2003. Larson and Clinton both published their biographies soon after in 2004. Historian Milton Sernett's 2007 book Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History discusses the major biographies of Tubman up to that time.

References

Clinton, Catherine (2004). Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. New York: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 978-0-316-14492-6 - via Open Library.

"Consumer Price Index (estimate) 1800-". Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

Franklin, Jonathan (March 13, 2023). "A Monument of Harriet Tubman Now Replaces a Statue of Christopher Columbus in Newark". . Archived from the original on June 15, 2023.

Gaige, Amity (August 23, 2013). "The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on July 25, 2019.

Gibson, Chantal N. & Silverman, Monique (2005). "Sur/Rendering Her Image: The Unknowable Harriet Tubman". Canadian Art Review. 30 (1): 25-38. JSTOR 42630711.

Hobson, Janell (2022). When God Lost Her Tongue: Historical Consciousness and the Black Feminist Imagination. Subversive Histories, Feminist Futures series. New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429243554. ISBN 978-0-429-24355-4. S2CID 240990028.

Humez, Jean M. (Summer 1993). "In Search of Harriet Tubman's Spiritual Autobiography". NWSA Journal. 5 (2): 162-182. JSTOR 4316258.

Humez, Jean (2003). Harriet Tubman: The Life and Life Stories. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0-299-19120-7 - via Open Library.

Kaufman, Rachel (May 13, 2018). "Pilot, Thinker, Soldier, Spy: The Epic Timeless Season Finale Twofer". Smithsonian Magazine. Archived from the original on October 17, 2020.

Larson, Kate Clifford (2004). Bound For the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 978-0-345-45627-4 - via Open Library.

Oertel, Kristen T. (2015). Harriet Tubman: Slavery, the Civil War, and Civil Rights in the Nineteenth-century America. Routledge Historical Americans series. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-135-94897-9.

Portelli, Alessandro (Fall 1988). "Fire on the Mountain". Review. Appalachian Journal. 16 (1): 87-90. JSTOR 40933404.

Roma, Catherine (2001). "Contemporary British Composers". In Pendle, Karin (ed.). Women and Music: A History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 227-251. ISBN 978-0-253-11503-4 - via Open Library.

Rosenberg, Amy S. (September 17, 2020). "The Harriet Tubman Museum in Cape May Marked Its Opening. Here's What's Inside, and Why It's in Cape May". The Philadelphia Inquirer. Archived from the original on September 21, 2020.

Sacks, Sam (May 17, 2019). "Fiction: Tales of History and Imagination". Books & Arts in Review. The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on July 25, 2019.

Vargas, Ángel (October 17, 2018). "La gesta de Harriet Tubman llega al Cervantino en forma de ópera" [The deeds of Harriet Tubman arrive at the Cervantino in the form of an opera]. (in Spanish). Archived from the original on April 17, 2021.

Further reading

External links

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Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Ross, c. March 1822 - March 10, 1913) was an American abolitionist and social activist. After escaping slavery, Tubman made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including her family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known collectively as the Underground Railroad.

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Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 1817 or 1818 - February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, during which he gained fame for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, he was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to enslavers' arguments that enslaved people lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been enslaved. It was in response to this disbelief that Douglass wrote his first autobiography.

Douglass wrote three autobiographies, describing his experiences as an enslaved person in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), which became a bestseller and was influential in promoting the cause of abolition, as was his second book, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). Following the Civil War, Douglass was an active campaigner for the rights of freed slaves and wrote his last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. First published in 1881 and revised in 1892, three years before his death, the book covers his life up to those dates. Douglass also actively supported women's suffrage, and he held several public offices. Without his knowledge or consent, Douglass became the first African American nominated for vice president of the United States, as the running mate of Victoria Woodhull on the Equal Rights Party ticket.

Douglass believed in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides, as well as in the liberal values of the U.S. Constitution. When radical abolitionists, under the motto "No Union with Slaveholders", criticized Douglass's willingness to engage in dialogue with slave owners, he replied: "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."

Early life and slavery

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Talbot County, Maryland. The plantation was between Hillsboro and Cordova; his birthplace was likely his grandmother's cabin east of Tappers Corner and west of Tuckahoe Creek. In his first autobiography, Douglass stated: "I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it." In successive autobiographies, he gave more precise estimates of when he was born, his final estimate being 1817. However, based on the extant records of Douglass's former owner, Aaron Anthony, historian Dickson J. Preston determined that Douglass was born in February 1818. Though the exact date of his birth is unknown, he chose to celebrate February 14 as his birthday, remembering that his mother called him her "Little Valentine."

Birth family

Douglass's mother, enslaved, was of African descent and his father, who may have been her master, apparently of European descent; in his Narrative (1845), Douglass wrote: "My father was a white man." According to David W. Blight's 2018 biography of Douglass, "For the rest of his life he searched in vain for the name of his true father." Douglass's genetic heritage likely also included Native American. Douglass said his mother Harriet Bailey gave him his name Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey and, after he escaped to the North in September 1838, he took the surname Douglass, having already dropped his two middle names.

He later wrote of his earliest times with his mother:

The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion, I know nothing. ... My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant. ... It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. ... I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone.

After separation from his mother during infancy, young Frederick lived with his maternal grandmother Betsy Bailey, who was also enslaved, and his maternal grandfather Isaac, who was free. Betsy would live until 1849. Frederick's mother remained on the plantation about 12 miles (19 km) away, visiting Frederick only a few times before her death when he was 7 years old.

Returning much later, about 1883, to purchase land in Talbot County that was meaningful to him, he was invited to address "a colored school":

I once knew a little colored boy whose mother and father died when he was six years old. He was a slave and had no one to care for him. He slept on a dirt floor in a hovel, and in cold weather would crawl into a meal bag head foremost and leave his feet in the ashes to keep them warm. Often he would roast an ear of corn and eat it to satisfy his hunger, and many times has he crawled under the barn or stable and secured eggs, which he would roast in the fire and eat.

That boy did not wear pants like you do, but a tow linen shirt. Schools were unknown to him, and he learned to spell from an old Webster's spelling-book and to read and write from posters on cellar and barn doors, while boys and men would help him. He would then preach and speak, and soon became well known. He became Presidential Elector, United States Marshal, United States Recorder, United States diplomat, and accumulated some wealth. He wore broadcloth and didn't have to divide crumbs with the dogs under the table. That boy was Frederick Douglass.

Early learning and experience

The Auld family

At the age of 6, Douglass was separated from his grandparents and moved to the Wye House plantation, where Aaron Anthony worked as overseer. After Anthony died in 1826, Douglass was given to Lucretia Auld, wife of Thomas Auld, who sent him to serve Thomas' brother Hugh Auld and his wife Sophia Auld in Baltimore. From the day he arrived, Sophia saw to it that Douglass was properly fed and clothed, and that he slept in a bed with sheets and a blanket. Douglass described her as a kind and tender-hearted woman, who treated him "as she supposed one human being ought to treat another." Douglass felt that he was lucky to be in the city, where he said enslaved people were almost freemen, compared to those on plantations.

When Douglass was about 12, Sophia Auld began teaching him the alphabet. Hugh Auld disapproved of the tutoring, feeling that literacy would encourage enslaved people to desire freedom. Douglass later referred to this as the "first decidedly antislavery lecture" he had ever heard. "'Very well, thought I,'" wrote Douglass. "'Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.' I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom."

Under her husband's influence, Sophia came to believe that education and slavery were incompatible and one day snatched a newspaper away from Douglass. She stopped teaching him altogether and hid all potential reading materials, including her Bible, from him. In his autobiography, Douglass related how he learned to read from white children in the neighborhood and by observing the writings of the men with whom he worked.

Douglass continued, secretly, to teach himself to read and write. He later often said, "knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom." As Douglass began to read newspapers, pamphlets, political materials, and books of every description, this new realm of thought led him to question and condemn the institution of slavery. In later years, Douglass credited The Columbian Orator, an anthology that he discovered at about age 12, with clarifying and defining his views on freedom and human rights. First published in 1797, the book is a classroom reader, containing essays, speeches, and dialogues, to assist students in learning reading and grammar. He later learned that his mother had also been literate, about which he would later declare:

William Freeland

When Douglass was hired out to William Freeland, he "gathered eventually more than thirty male slaves on Sundays, and sometimes even on weeknights, in a Sabbath literacy school."

Edward Covey

In 1833, Thomas Auld took Douglass back from Hugh ("[a]s a means of punishing Hugh," Douglass later wrote). Thomas sent Douglass to work for Edward Covey, a poor farmer who had a reputation as a "slave-breaker". He whipped Douglass so frequently that his wounds had little time to heal. Douglass later said the frequent whippings broke his body, soul, and spirit. The 16-year-old Douglass finally rebelled against the beatings, however, and fought back. After Douglass won a physical confrontation, Covey never tried to beat him again.

Recounting his beatings at Covey's farm in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass described himself as "a man transformed into a brute!" Still, Douglass came to see his physical fight with Covey as life-transforming, and introduced the story in his autobiography as such: "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man."

Escape from slavery

On September 3, 1838, Douglass successfully escaped by boarding a northbound train of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad in Baltimore. The area where he boarded was formerly thought to be a short distance east of the train depot, in a recently developed neighborhood between the modern neighborhoods of Harbor East and Little Italy. This depot was at President and Fleet Streets, east of "The Basin" of the Baltimore harbor, on the northwest branch of the Patapsco River. Research cited in 2021, however, suggests that Douglass in fact boarded the train at the Canton Depot of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore Railroad on Boston Street, in the Canton neighborhood of Baltimore, further east.

Douglass reached Havre de Grace, Maryland, in Harford County, in the northeast corner of the state, along the southwest shore of the Susquehanna River, which flowed into the Chesapeake Bay. Although this placed him only some 20 miles (32 km) from the Maryland-Pennsylvania state line, it was easier to continue by rail through Delaware, another slave state. Dressed in a sailor's uniform provided to him by Murray, who also gave him part of her savings to cover his travel costs, he carried identification papers and protection papers that he had obtained from a free black seaman.

Douglass crossed the wide Susquehanna River by the railroad's steam-ferry at Havre de Grace to Perryville on the opposite shore, in Cecil County, then continued by train across the state line to Wilmington, Delaware, a large port at the head of the Delaware Bay. From there, because the rail line was not yet completed, he went by steamboat along the Delaware River farther northeast to the "Quaker City" of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, an anti-slavery stronghold. He continued to the safe house of abolitionist David Ruggles in New York City. His entire journey to freedom took less than 24 hours. Douglass later wrote of his arrival in New York City:

Once Douglass had arrived, he sent for Murray to follow him north to New York. She brought the basic supplies for them to set up a home. They were married on September 15, 1838, by a black Presbyterian minister, just eleven days after Douglass had reached New York. At first they adopted Johnson as their married name, to divert attention.

Religious views

As a child, Douglass was exposed to a number of religious sermons, and in his youth, he sometimes heard Sophia Auld reading the Bible. In time, he became interested in literacy; he began reading and copying bible verses, and he eventually converted to Christianity. He described this approach in his last biography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass:

Douglass was mentored by Rev. Charles Lawson, and, early in his activism, he often included biblical allusions and religious metaphors in his speeches. Although a believer, he strongly criticized religious hypocrisy and accused slaveholders of " wickedness", lack of morality, and failure to follow the Golden Rule. In this sense, Douglass distinguished between the "Christianity of Christ" and the "Christianity of America" and considered religious slaveholders and clergymen who defended slavery as the most brutal, sinful, and cynical of all who represented "wolves in sheep's clothing".

In What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, an oration Douglass gave in the Corinthian Hall of Rochester, he sharply criticized the attitude of religious people who kept silent about slavery, and he charged that ministers committed a " blasphemy" when they taught it as sanctioned by religion. He considered that a law passed to support slavery was "one of the grossest infringements of Christian Liberty" and said that pro-slavery clergymen within the American Church "stripped the love of God of its beauty, and leave the throne of religion a huge, horrible, repulsive form", and "an abomination in the sight of God".

Of ministers like John Chase Lord, Leonard Elijah Lathrop, Ichabod Spencer, and Orville Dewey, he said that they taught, against the Scriptures, that "we ought to obey man's law before the law of God". He further asserted, "in speaking of the American church, however, let it be distinctly understood that I mean the great mass of the religious organizations of our land. There are exceptions, and I thank God that there are. Noble men may be found, scattered all over these Northern States ... Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn, Samuel J. May of Syracuse, and my esteemed friend [Robert R. Raymonde]".

He maintained that "upon these men lies the duty to inspire our ranks with high religious faith and zeal, and to cheer us on in the great mission of the slave's redemption from his chains". In addition, he called religious people to embrace abolitionism, stating, "let the religious press, the pulpit, the Sunday school, the conference meeting, the great ecclesiastical, missionary, Bible and tract associations of the land array their immense powers against slavery and slave-holding; and the whole system of crime and blood would be scattered to the winds."

During his visits to the United Kingdom between 1846 and 1848, Douglass asked British Christians never to support American churches that permitted slavery, and he expressed his happiness to know that a group of ministers in Belfast had refused to admit slaveholders as members of the Church.

On his return to the United States, Douglass founded the North Star, a weekly publication with the motto "Right is of no sex, Truth is of no color, God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren." In his 1848 "Letter to Thomas Auld", Douglass denounced his former slaveholder for leaving Douglass's family illiterate:

Sometimes considered a precursor of a non-denominational liberation theology, Douglass was a deeply spiritual man, as his home continues to show. The fireplace mantle features busts of two of his favorite philosophers, David Friedrich Strauss, author of The Life of Jesus, and Ludwig Feuerbach, author of The Essence of Christianity. In addition to several Bibles and books about various religions in the library, images of angels and Jesus are displayed, as well as interior and exterior photographs of Washington's Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. Throughout his life, Douglass had linked that individual experience with social reform, and, according to John Stauffer, he, like other Christian abolitionists, followed practices such as abstaining from tobacco, alcohol and other substances that he believed corrupted body and soul. According to David W. Blight, however, "Douglass loved cigars" and received them as gifts from Ottilie Assing.

Family life

Douglass and Anna Murray had five children: Rosetta Douglass, Lewis Henry Douglass, Frederick Douglass Jr., Charles Remond Douglass, and Annie Douglass (died at the age of ten). Charles and Rosetta helped produce his newspapers.

Anna Douglass remained a loyal supporter of her husband's public work. His relationships with Julia Griffiths and Ottilie Assing, two women with whom he was professionally involved, caused recurring speculation and scandals. Assing was a journalist recently immigrated from Germany, who first visited Douglass in 1856 seeking permission to translate My Bondage and My Freedom into German. Until 1872, she often stayed at his house "for several months at a time" as his "intellectual and emotional companion."

Assing held Anna Douglass "in utter contempt" and was vainly hoping that Douglass would separate from his wife. Douglass biographer David W. Blight concludes that Assing and Douglass "were probably lovers". Though Douglass and Assing are widely believed to have had an intimate relationship, the surviving correspondence contains no proof of such a relationship.

After Anna died in 1882, in 1884 Douglass married again, to Helen Pitts, a white suffragist and abolitionist from Honeoye, New York. Pitts was the daughter of Gideon Pitts Jr., an abolitionist colleague and friend of Douglass's. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College (then called Mount Holyoke Female Seminary), Pitts worked on a radical feminist publication named Alpha while living in Washington, D.C. She later worked as Douglass's secretary.

Assing, who had depression and was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer, committed suicide in France in 1884 after hearing of the marriage. Upon her death, Assing bequeathed Douglass a $13,000 trust fund, a "large album", and his choice of books from her library.

The marriage of Douglass and Pitts provoked a storm of controversy, since Pitts was both white and nearly 20 years younger. Many in her family stopped speaking to her; his children considered the marriage a repudiation of their mother. But feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton congratulated the couple. Douglass responded to the criticisms by saying that his first marriage had been to someone the color of his mother, and his second to someone the color of his father.

Abolitionist and preacher

Frederick Douglass, c. 1840s, in his 20s

The couple settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts (an abolitionist center, full of former enslaved people), in 1838, moving to Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1841. After meeting and staying with Nathan and Mary Johnson, they adopted Douglass as their married name. Douglass had grown up using his mother's surname of Bailey; after escaping slavery he had changed his surname first to Stanley and then to Johnson. In New Bedford, the latter was such a common name that he wanted one that was more distinctive, and asked Nathan Johnson to choose a suitable surname. Nathan suggested " Douglass", after having read the poem The Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott, in which two of the principal characters have the surname " Douglas".

Douglass thought of joining a white Methodist Church, but was disappointed, from the beginning, upon finding that it was segregated. Later, he joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, an independent black denomination first established in New York City, which counted among its members Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. He became a licensed preacher in 1839, which helped him to hone his oratorical skills. He held various positions, including steward, Sunday-school superintendent, and sexton. In 1840, Douglass delivered a speech in Elmira, New York, then a station on the Underground Railroad, in which a black congregation would form years later, becoming the region's largest church by 1940.

Douglass also joined several organizations in New Bedford and regularly attended abolitionist meetings. He subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison's weekly newspaper, The Liberator. He later said that "no face and form ever impressed me with such sentiments [of the hatred of slavery] as did those of William Lloyd Garrison." So deep was this influence that in his last autobiography, Douglass said "his paper took a place in my heart second only to The Bible."

Garrison was likewise impressed with Douglass and had written about his anti- colonization stance in The Liberator as early as 1839. Douglass first heard Garrison speak in 1841, at a lecture that Garrison gave in Liberty Hall, New Bedford. At another meeting, Douglass was unexpectedly invited to speak. After telling his story, Douglass was encouraged to become an anti-slavery lecturer. A few days later, Douglass spoke at the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society's annual convention, in Nantucket. Then 23 years old, Douglass conquered his nervousness and gave an eloquent speech about his life as a slave.

While living in Lynn, Douglass engaged in an early protest against segregated transportation. In September 1841, at Lynn Central Square station, Douglass and his friend James N. Buffum were thrown off an Eastern Railroad train because Douglass refused to sit in the segregated railroad coach.

In 1843, Douglass joined other speakers in the American Anti-Slavery Society's "Hundred Conventions" project, a six-month tour at meeting halls throughout the eastern and midwestern United States. During this tour, slavery supporters frequently accosted Douglass. At a lecture in Pendleton, Indiana, an angry mob chased and beat Douglass before a local Quaker family, the Hardys, rescued him. His hand was broken in the attack; it healed improperly and bothered him for the rest of his life. A stone marker in Falls Park in the Pendleton Historic District commemorates this event.

In 1847, Douglass explained to Garrison, "I have no love for America, as such; I have no patriotism. I have no country. What country have I? The Institutions of this Country do not know me-do not recognize me as a man."

Autobiography

Douglass's best-known work is his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, written during his time in Lynn, Massachusetts and published in 1845. At the time, some skeptics questioned whether a black man could have produced such an eloquent piece of literature. The book received generally positive reviews and became an immediate bestseller. Within three years, it had been reprinted nine times, with 11,000 copies circulating in the United States. It was also translated into French and Dutch and published in Europe.

Douglass published three autobiographies during his lifetime (and revised the third of these), each time expanding on the previous one. The 1845 Narrative was his biggest seller and probably allowed him to raise the funds to gain his legal freedom the following year, as discussed below. In 1855, Douglass published My Bondage and My Freedom. In 1881, in his sixties, Douglass published Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, which he revised in 1892.

Travels to Ireland and Great Britain

Douglass's friends and mentors feared that the publicity would draw the attention of his ex-owner, Hugh Auld, who might try to get his "property" back. They encouraged Douglass to tour Ireland, as many former slaves had done. Douglass set sail on the Cambria for Liverpool, England, on August 16, 1845. He traveled in Ireland as the Great Famine was beginning.

Eleven days and a half gone, and I have crossed three thousand miles of the perilous deep. Instead of a democratic government, I am under a monarchical government. Instead of the bright, blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle [Ireland]. I breathe, and lo! the chattel [slave] becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult. I employ a cab-I am seated beside white people-I reach the hotel-I enter the same door-I am shown into the same parlor-I dine at the same table-and no one is offended.... I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people. When I go to church, I am met by no upturned nose and scornful lip to tell me, ' We don't allow niggers in here!'

He also met and befriended the Irish nationalist and strident abolitionist Daniel O'Connell, who was to be a great inspiration.

Douglass spent two years in Ireland and Great Britain, lecturing in churches and chapels. His draw was such that some facilities were "crowded to suffocation". One example was his hugely popular London Reception Speech, which Douglass delivered in May 1846 at Alexander Fletcher's Finsbury Chapel. Douglass remarked that in England he was treated not "as a color, but as a man".

In 1846, Douglass met with Thomas Clarkson, one of the last living British abolitionists, who had persuaded Parliament to abolish slavery in Great Britain's colonies. During this trip Douglass became legally free, as British supporters led by Anna Richardson and her sister-in-law Ellen of Newcastle upon Tyne raised funds to buy his freedom from his American owner Thomas Auld. Many supporters tried to encourage Douglass to remain in England but, with his wife still in Massachusetts and three million of his black brethren in bondage in the United States, he returned to America in the spring of 1847, soon after the death of Daniel O'Connell.

In the 21st century, historical plaques were installed on buildings in Cork and Waterford, Ireland, and London to celebrate Douglass's visit: the first is on the Imperial Hotel in Cork and was unveiled on August 31, 2012; the second is on the façade of Waterford City Hall, unveiled on October 7, 2013. It commemorates his speech there on October 9, 1845. The third plaque adorns Nell Gwynn House, South Kensington in London, at the site of an earlier house where Douglass stayed with the British abolitionist George Thompson. On the 31st of July 2023 the first statue of him in Europe was unveiled in High Street in Belfast.

Douglass spent time in Scotland and was appointed "Scotland's Antislavery agent." He made anti-slavery speeches and wrote letters back to the USA. He considered the city of Edinburgh to be elegant, grand and very welcoming. Maps of the places in the city that were important to his stay are held by the National Library of Scotland. A plaque and a mural on Gilmore Place in Edinburgh mark his stay there in 1846.

"A variety of collaborative projects are currently [in 2021] underway to commemorate Frederick Douglass's journey and visit to Ireland in the 19th century."

Return to the United States; the abolitionist movement

After returning to the U.S. in 1847, using £500 (equivalent to $48,612 in 2021) given to him by English supporters, Douglass started publishing his first abolitionist newspaper, the , from the basement of the Memorial AME Zion Church in Rochester, New York. Originally, Pittsburgh journalist Martin Delany was co-editor but Douglass didn't feel he brought in enough subscriptions, and they parted ways.[page needed ] The North Star's motto was "Right is of no Sex - Truth is of no Color - God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren." The AME Church and North Star joined in the freedmen community's vigorous opposition to the mostly white American Colonization Society and its proposal to send free black people to Africa. Douglass also participated in the Underground Railroad. He and his wife provided lodging and resources in their home to more than four hundred fugitive slaves.

Douglass also soon split with Garrison, whom he found unwilling to support actions against American slavery. Earlier Douglass had agreed with Garrison's position that the Constitution was pro-slavery, because of the Three-Fifths Clause, the compromise that provided that 60 percent of the number of enslaved people would be added to "the whole Number of free Persons" for the purpose of apportioning congressional seats; and protection of the international slave trade through 1807. Garrison had burned copies of the Constitution to express his opinion. However, Lysander Spooner published The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1846), which examined the United States Constitution as an antislavery document. Douglass's change of opinion about the Constitution and his splitting from Garrison around 1847 became one of the abolitionist movement's most notable divisions. Douglass angered Garrison by saying that the Constitution could and should be used as an instrument in the fight against slavery.

On July 24, 1851, "shortly after his announced change of opinion", Douglass delivered a speech titled, "Is the United States Constitution For or Against Slavery". He expressed his changed views again in an 1860 speech in Glasgow, Scotland, titled, " The Constitution of the United States: is it pro-slavery or anti-slavery?". In that speech, he said, "When I escaped from slavery, and was introduced to the Garrisonians, I adopted very many of their opinions.... I was young, had read but little, and naturally took some things on trust. Subsequent reading and experience", however, "brought me to other conclusions". He now believed that "dissolution of the American Union", which Garrison advocated, "would place the slave system more exclusively under the control of the slaveholding States...." In addition, "Mr. Garrison and his friends tell us that while in the Union we are responsible for slavery.... I deny that going out of the Union would free us from that responsibility.... The American people in the Northern States have helped to enslave the black people. Their duty will not be done till they give them back their plundered rights."

Letter to his former owner

In September 1848, on the tenth anniversary of his escape, Douglass published an open letter addressed to his former master, Thomas Auld, berating him for his conduct, and inquiring after members of his family still held by Auld. In the course of the letter, Douglass adeptly transitions from formal and restrained to familiar and then to impassioned. At one point he is the proud parent, describing his improved circumstances and the progress of his own four young children. But then he dramatically shifts tone:

In a graphic passage, Douglass asked Auld how he would feel if Douglass had come to take away his daughter Amanda into slavery, treating her the way he and members of his family had been treated by Auld. Yet in his conclusion Douglass shows his focus and benevolence, stating that he has "no malice towards him personally," and asserts that, "there is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine, and there is nothing in my house which you might need for comfort, which I would not readily grant. Indeed, I should esteem it a privilege, to set you an example as to how mankind ought to treat each other."

Women's rights

In 1848, Douglass was the only black person to attend the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention, in upstate New York. Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked the assembly to pass a resolution asking for women's suffrage. Many of those present opposed the idea, including influential Quakers James and Lucretia Mott. Douglass stood and spoke eloquently in favor of women's suffrage; he said that he could not accept the right to vote as a black man if women could also not claim that right. He suggested that the world would be a better place if women were involved in the political sphere:

After Douglass's powerful words, the attendees passed the resolution.

In the wake of the Seneca Falls Convention, Douglass used an editorial in The North Star to press the case for women's rights. He recalled the "marked ability and dignity" of the proceedings, and briefly conveyed several arguments of the convention and feminist thought at the time.

On the first count, Douglass acknowledged the "decorum" of the participants in the face of disagreement. In the remainder, he discussed the primary document that emerged from the conference, a Declaration of Sentiments, and the "infant" feminist cause. Strikingly, he expressed the belief that "[a] discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far more complacency...than would be a discussion of the rights of women," and Douglass noted the link between abolitionism and feminism, the overlap between the communities.

His opinion as the editor of a prominent newspaper carried weight, and he stated the position of the North Star explicitly: "We hold woman to be justly entitled to all we claim for man." This letter, written a week after the convention, reaffirmed the first part of the paper's slogan, "right is of no sex."

After the Civil War, when the 15th Amendment giving black men the right to vote was being debated, Douglass split with the Stanton-led faction of the women's rights movement. Douglass supported the amendment, which would grant suffrage to black men. Stanton opposed the 15th Amendment because it limited the expansion of suffrage to black men; she predicted its passage would delay for decades the cause for women's right to vote. Stanton argued that American women and black men should band together to fight for universal suffrage, and opposed any bill that split the issues. Douglass and Stanton both knew that there was not yet enough male support for women's right to vote, but that an amendment giving black men the vote could pass in the late 1860s. Stanton wanted to attach women's suffrage to that of black men so that her cause would be carried to success.

Douglass thought such a strategy was too risky, that there was barely enough support for black men's suffrage. He feared that linking the cause of women's suffrage to that of black men would result in failure for both. Douglass argued that white women, already empowered by their social connections to fathers, husbands, and brothers, at least vicariously had the vote. Black women, he believed, would have the same degree of empowerment as white women once black men had the vote. Douglass assured the American women that at no time had he ever argued against women's right to vote.

Ideological refinement

Meanwhile, in 1851, Douglass merged the North Star with Gerrit Smith's Liberty Party Paper to form Frederick Douglass' Paper, which was published until 1860.

On July 5, 1852, Douglass delivered an address in Corinthian Hall at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. This speech eventually became known as " What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?"; one biographer called it "perhaps the greatest antislavery oration ever given." In 1853, he was a prominent attendee of the radical abolitionist National African American Convention in Rochester. Douglass was one of five people whose names were attached to the address of the convention to the people of the United States published under the title, The Claims of Our Common Cause. The other four were Amos Noë Freeman, James Monroe Whitfield, Henry O. Wagoner, and George Boyer Vashon.

Like many abolitionists, Douglass believed that education would be crucial for African Americans to improve their lives; he was an early advocate for school desegregation. In the 1850s, Douglass observed that New York's facilities and instruction for African American children were vastly inferior to those for European Americans. Douglass called for court action to open all schools to all children. He said that full inclusion within the educational system was a more pressing need for African Americans than political issues such as suffrage.

Douglass argued against John Brown's plan to attack the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, painting by Jacob Lawrence

On March 12, 1859, Douglass met with radical abolitionists John Brown, George DeBaptiste, and others at William Webb's house in Detroit to discuss emancipation. Douglass met Brown again when Brown visited his home two months before leading the raid on Harpers Ferry. Brown penned his Provisional Constitution during his two-week stay with Douglass. Also staying with Douglass for over a year was Shields Green, a fugitive slave whom Douglass was helping, as he often did.

Almost all that is known about this incident comes from Douglass. It is clear that it was of immense importance to him, both as a turning point in his life-not accompanying John Brown-and its importance in his public image. The meeting was not revealed by Douglass for 20 years. He first disclosed it in his speech on John Brown at Storer College in 1881, trying unsuccessfully to raise money to support a John Brown professorship at Storer, to be held by a black man. He again referred to it stunningly in his last Autobiography.

After the raid, which took place between October 16 and 18, 1859, Douglass was accused both of supporting Brown and of not supporting him enough. He was nearly arrested on a Virginia warrant, and fled for a brief time to Canada before proceeding onward to England on a previously planned lecture tour, arriving near the end of November. During his lecture tour of Great Britain, on March 26, 1860, Douglass delivered a speech before the Scottish Anti-Slavery Society in Glasgow, " The Constitution of the United States: is it pro-slavery or anti-slavery?", outlining his views on the American Constitution. That month, on the 13th, Douglass's youngest daughter Annie died in Rochester, New York, just days shy of her 11th birthday. Douglass sailed back from England the following month, traveling through Canada to avoid detection.

Photography

Douglass considered photography very important in ending slavery and racism, and believed that the camera would not lie, even in the hands of a racist white person, as photographs were an excellent counter to many racist caricatures, particularly in blackface minstrelsy. He was the most photographed American of the 19th century, consciously using photography to advance his political views. He never smiled, specifically so as not to play into the racist caricature of a happy enslaved person. He tended to look directly into the camera and confront the viewer with a stern look.

Civil War years

Before the Civil War

By the time of the Civil War, Douglass was one of the most famous black men in the country, known for his orations on the condition of the black race and on other issues such as women's rights. His eloquence gathered crowds at every location. His reception by leaders in England and Ireland added to his stature.

He had been seriously proposed for the congressional seat of his friend and supporter Gerrit Smith, who declined to run again after his term ended in 1854. Smith recommended to him that he not run, because there were "strenuous objections" from members of Congress. The possibility "afflicted some with convulsions, others with panic, more with an astonishing flow of exceedingly select and nervous language", "giving vent to all sorts of linguistic enormities." If the House agreed to seat him, which was unlikely, all the Southern members would walk out, so the country would finally be split. No black person would serve in Congress until 1870, just after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Fight for emancipation and suffrage

1863 broadside Men of Color to Arms!, written by Douglass

Douglass and the abolitionists argued that because the aim of the Civil War was to end slavery, African Americans should be allowed to engage in the fight for their freedom. Douglass publicized this view in his newspapers and several speeches. After Lincoln had finally allowed black soldiers to serve in the Union army, Douglass helped the recruitment efforts, publishing his famous broadside Men of Color to Arms! on March 21, 1863. His eldest son, Charles Douglass, joined the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, but was ill for much of his service. Lewis Douglass fought at the Battle of Fort Wagner. Another son, Frederick Douglass Jr., also served as a recruiter.

During the U.S. Presidential Election of 1864, Douglass supported John C. Frémont, who was the candidate of the abolitionist Radical Democracy Party. Douglass was disappointed that President Lincoln did not publicly endorse suffrage for black freedmen. Douglass believed that since African American men were fighting for the Union in the American Civil War, they deserved the right to vote.

After Lincoln's death

The postwar ratification of the 13th Amendment, on December 6, 1865, outlawed slavery, "except as a punishment for crime." The 14th Amendment provided for birthright citizenship and prohibited the states from abridging the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States or denying any "person" due process of law or equal protection of the laws. The 15th Amendment protected all citizens from being discriminated against in voting because of race. After Lincoln had been assassinated, Douglass conferred with President Andrew Johnson on the subject of black suffrage.

On April 14, 1876, Douglass delivered the keynote speech at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington's Lincoln Park. He spoke frankly about the complex legacy of Lincoln, noting what he perceived as both positive and negative attributes of the late President. Calling Lincoln "the white man's President," Douglass criticized Lincoln's tardiness in joining the cause of emancipation, noting that Lincoln initially opposed the expansion of slavery but did not support its elimination: "He had been ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the humanity of the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people. Lincoln was neither our man or our model". But Douglass also asked, "Can any colored man, or any white man friendly to the freedom of all men, ever forget the night which followed the first day of January 1863, when the world was to see if Abraham Lincoln would prove to be as good as his word?" He also said: "Though Mr. Lincoln shared the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro, it is hardly necessary to say that in his heart of hearts he loathed and hated slavery...." Most famously, he added: "Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined."

The crowd, roused by his speech, gave Douglass a standing ovation. Lincoln's widow Mary Lincoln supposedly gave Lincoln's favorite walking-stick to Douglass in appreciation. That walking stick still rests in his final residence, "Cedar Hill" in Washington, D.C., now preserved as the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.

After delivering the speech, Douglass immediately wrote to the National Republican newspaper in Washington (which published his letter five days later, on April 19), criticizing the statue's design and suggesting the park could be improved by more dignified monuments of free black people. "The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude," Douglass wrote. "What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man."

Reconstruction era

Meanwhile, white insurgents had quickly arisen in the South after the war, organizing first as secret vigilante groups, including the Ku Klux Klan. Armed insurgency took different forms. Powerful paramilitary groups included the White League and the Red Shirts, both active during the 1870s in the Deep South. They operated as "the military arm of the Democratic Party", turning out Republican officeholders and disrupting elections. Starting 10 years after the war, Democrats regained political power in every state of the former Confederacy and began to reassert white supremacy. They enforced this by a combination of violence, late 19th-century laws imposing segregation and a concerted effort to disfranchise African Americans. New labor and criminal laws also limited their freedom.

To combat these efforts, Douglass supported the presidential campaign of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868. In 1870, Douglass started his last newspaper, the New National Era, attempting to hold his country to its commitment to equality. President Grant sent a congressionally sponsored commission, accompanied by Douglass, on a mission to the West Indies to investigate whether the annexation of Santo Domingo would be good for the United States. Grant believed annexation would help relieve the violent situation in the South by allowing African Americans their own state. Douglass and the commission favored annexation, but Congress remained opposed to annexation. Douglass criticized Senator Charles Sumner, who opposed annexation, stating that if Sumner continued to oppose annexation he would "regard him as the worst foe the colored race has on this continent."

Douglass's former residence in the U Street Corridor of Washington, D.C. He built 2000-2004 17th Street, NW, in 1875.

After the midterm elections, Grant signed the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (also known as the Klan Act), and the second and third Enforcement Acts. Grant used their provisions vigorously, suspending habeas corpus in South Carolina and sending troops there and into other states. Under his leadership over 5,000 arrests were made. Grant's vigor in disrupting the Klan made him unpopular among many whites but earned praise from Douglass. A Douglass associate wrote that African Americans "will ever cherish a grateful remembrance of [Grant's] name, fame and great services."

In 1872, Douglass became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States, as Victoria Woodhull's running mate on the Equal Rights Party ticket. He was nominated without his knowledge. Douglass neither campaigned for the ticket nor acknowledged that he had been nominated. In that year, he was presidential elector at large for the State of New York, and took that state's votes to Washington, D.C.

However, in early June of that year, Douglass's third Rochester home, on South Avenue, burned down; arson was suspected. There was extensive damage to the house, its furnishings, and the grounds; in addition, sixteen volumes of the North Star and Frederick Douglass' Paper were lost. Douglass then moved to Washington, D.C.

Throughout the Reconstruction era, Douglass continued speaking, emphasizing the importance of work, voting rights and actual exercise of suffrage. His speeches for the twenty-five years following the war emphasized work to counter the racism that was then prevalent in unions. In a November 15, 1867, speech he said:

...rights rest in three boxes. The ballot box, jury box and the cartridge box. Let no man be kept from the ballot box because of his color. Let no woman be kept from the ballot box because of her sex.

Douglass spoke at many colleges around the country, including Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, in 1873.

Frederick Douglas House

In 1877 Frederick Douglas bought a house that included a big yard, as well as a studio where he did most of his work; he lived in this house from 1878 until his death in 1895, and it was named the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.

Final years in Washington, D.C.

The Freedman's Savings Bank went bankrupt on June 29, 1874, just a few months after Douglass became its president in late March. During that same economic crisis, his final newspaper, The New National Era, failed in September. When Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was elected president, he named Douglass United States Marshal for the District of Columbia, making him the first person of color to be so named. The United States Senate voted to confirm him on March 17, 1877. Douglass accepted the appointment, which helped assure his family's financial security. During his tenure, Douglass was urged by his supporters to resign from his commission, since he was never asked to introduce visiting foreign dignitaries to the President, which is one of the usual duties of that post. However, Douglass believed that no covert racism was implied by the omission and stated that he was always warmly welcomed in presidential circles.

Cedar Hill, Douglass's house in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C., is preserved as a National Historic Site.

In 1877, Douglass visited his former enslaver Thomas Auld on his deathbed, and the two men reconciled. Douglass had met Auld's daughter, Amanda Auld Sears, some years prior. She had requested the meeting and had subsequently attended and cheered one of Douglass's speeches. Her father complimented her for reaching out to Douglass. The visit also appears to have brought closure to Douglass, although some criticized his effort.

That same year, Douglass bought the house that was to be the family's final home in Washington, D.C., on a hill above the Anacostia River. He and Anna named it Cedar Hill (also spelled CedarHill). They expanded the house from 14 to 21 rooms and included a china closet. One year later, Douglass purchased adjoining lots and expanded the property to 15 acres (61,000 m ²). The home is now preserved as the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.

In 1881, Douglass published the final edition of his autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, which he updated in 1892. In 1881, he was appointed Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia. His wife Anna Murray Douglass died in 1882, leaving the widower devastated. After a period of mourning, Douglass found new meaning from working with activist Ida B. Wells. He remarried in 1884, as mentioned above.

Douglass also continued his speaking engagements and travel, both in the United States and abroad. With new wife Helen, Douglass traveled to England, Ireland, France, Italy, Egypt, and Greece from 1886 to 1887. He became known for advocating Irish Home Rule and supported Charles Stewart Parnell in Ireland.

At the 1888 Republican National Convention, Douglass became the first African American to receive a vote for President of the United States in a major party's roll call vote. That year, Douglass spoke at Claflin College, a historically black college in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and the state's oldest such institution.

Many African Americans, called Exodusters, escaped the Klan and racially discriminatory laws in the South by moving to Kansas, where some formed all-black towns to have a greater level of freedom and autonomy. Douglass favored neither this nor the Back-to-Africa movement. He thought the latter resembled the American Colonization Society, which he had opposed in his youth. In 1892, at an Indianapolis conference convened by Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, Douglass spoke out against the separatist movements, urging blacks to stick it out. He made similar speeches as early as 1879 and was criticized both by fellow leaders and some audiences, who even booed him for this position. Speaking in Baltimore in 1894, Douglass said, "I hope and trust all will come out right in the end, but the immediate future looks dark and troubled. I cannot shut my eyes to the ugly facts before me."

President Harrison appointed Douglass as the United States's minister resident and consul-general to the Republic of Haiti and Chargé d'affaires for Santo Domingo in 1889, but Douglass resigned the commission in July 1891 when it became apparent that the American President was intent upon gaining permanent access to Haitian territory regardless of that country's desires. In 1892, Haiti made Douglass a co-commissioner of its pavilion at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

In 1892, Douglass constructed rental housing for blacks, now known as Douglass Place, in the Fells Point area of Baltimore. The complex still exists, and in 2003 was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

On February 20, 1895, Douglass attended a meeting of the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C. During that meeting, he was brought to the platform and received a standing ovation. Shortly after he returned home, Douglass died of a massive heart attack. He was 77.

Thousands of people passed by his coffin to show their respect. United States Senators and Supreme Court judges were pallbearers. Jeremiah Rankin, President of Howard University, delivered "a masterly address". A letter from Elizabeth Cady Stanton was read. The Secretary of the Haitian Legation "expressed the condolence of his country in melodious French."

Douglass's coffin was transported to Rochester, New York, where he had lived for 25 years, longer than anywhere else in his life. His body was received in state at City Hall, flags were flown at half mast, and schools adjourned. He was buried next to Anna in the Douglass family plot of Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester's premier memorial park. Helen was also buried there, in 1903. His grave is, with that of Susan B. Anthony, the most visited in the cemetery. A marker, erected by the University of Rochester and other friends, describes him as "escaped slave, abolitionist, suffragist, journalist and statesman, founder of the Civil Rights Movement in America".

1847. "Liberty", an eight-line poem, was written by Frederick Douglass in his notebook on September 13, 1847, in Cleveland, Ohio. Since mid-August he and William Lloyd Garrison, on a Western tour for the abolitionist movement, had been traveling through Ohio, where their receptions ranged from hospitable to enthusiastic. This raised Douglass's spirits considerably after he had faced an onslaught of "rotten eggs and all manner of stones and brickbats" while speaking a few weeks earlier in the courthouse at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. As a result of his receptions in Ohio, he was moved to write poetry on at least one other occasion in that state after he had written the poem "Liberty". The handwritten poem is now held in the Xavier University of Louisiana, Archives & Special Collections.

Legacy and honors

A 1965 U.S. postage stamp, published during the upsurge of the civil rights movement

Roy Finkenbine argues:

The most influential African American of the nineteenth century, Douglass made a career of agitating the American conscience. He spoke and wrote on behalf of a variety of reform causes: women's rights, temperance, peace, land reform, free public education, and the abolition of capital punishment. But he devoted the bulk of his time, immense talent, and boundless energy to ending slavery and gaining equal rights for African Americans. These were the central concerns of his long reform career. Douglass understood that the struggle for emancipation and equality demanded forceful, persistent, and unyielding agitation. And he recognized that African Americans must play a conspicuous role in that struggle. Less than a month before his death, when a young black man solicited his advice to an African American just starting out in the world, Douglass replied without hesitation: ″Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!″

The Episcopal Church remembers Douglass with a Lesser Feast annually on its liturgical calendar for February 20, the anniversary of his death. Many public schools have also been named in his honor. Douglass still has living descendants today, such as Ken Morris, who is also a descendant of Booker T. Washington. Other honors and remembrances include:

In 1871, a bust of Douglass was unveiled at Sibley Hall, University of Rochester.

In 1895, the first hospital for black people in Philadelphia, PA was named the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital. Black medical professionals, excluded from other facilities, were trained and employed there. In 1948, it merged to form Mercy-Douglass Hospital.

In 1899, a statue of Frederick Douglass was unveiled in Rochester, New York, making Douglass the first African-American to be so memorialized in the country.

In 1921, members of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity (the first African-American intercollegiate fraternity) designated Frederick Douglass as an honorary member. Douglass thus became the only man to receive an honorary membership posthumously.

The Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, sometimes referred to as the South Capitol Street Bridge, just south of the US Capitol in Washington, D.C., was built in 1950 and named in his honor.

In 1962, his home in Anacostia (Washington, D.C.) became part of the National Park System and in 1988 was designated the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.

In 1965, the United States Postal Service honored Douglass with a stamp in the Prominent Americans series.

In 1999, Yale University established the Frederick Douglass Book Prize for works in the history of slavery and abolition, in his honor. The annual $25,000 prize is administered by the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale.

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante named Frederick Douglass to his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

In 2003, Douglass Place, the rental housing units that Douglass built in Baltimore in 1892 for blacks, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 2007, the former Troup-Howell Bridge, which carried Interstate 490 over the Genesee River in Rochester, was redesigned and renamed the Frederick Douglass - Susan B. Anthony Memorial Bridge.

In 2010, the Frederick Douglass Memorial was unveiled at Frederick Douglass Circle at the northwest corner of Central Park in New York City.

In 2010, the New York Writers Hall of Fame inducted Douglass in its inaugural class.

On June 12, 2011, Talbot County, Maryland, installed a seven-foot (2-meter) bronze statue of Douglass on the lawn of the county courthouse in Easton, Maryland.

On June 19, 2013, a statue of Douglass by Maryland artist Steven Weitzman was unveiled in the United States Capitol Visitor Center as part of the National Statuary Hall Collection, the first statue representing the District of Columbia.

On September 15, 2014, under the leadership of Governor Martin O'Malley a portrait of Frederick Douglass was unveiled at his official residence in Annapolis, MD. This painting, by artist Simmie Knox, is the first African-American portrait to grace the walls of Government House. Commissioned by Eddie C. Brown, founder of Brown Capital Management, LLC, the painting was presented at a reception by the Governor.

On January 7, 2015, as a parting gift in honor of Governor Martin O'Malley's last Board of Public Works a portrait of Frederick Douglass was gifted to him by Peter Franchot. Two editions of this artwork, by artist Benjamin Jancewicz, were purchased from Galerie Myrtis by Peter Franchot and his wife Ann both as a gift for the Governor as well as to add to their own collection. The Governor's edition now hangs in his office.[non-primary source needed ]

In November 2015, the University of Maryland dedicated Frederick Douglass Plaza, an outdoor space where visitors can read quotes and see a bronze statue of Douglass.

On October 18, 2016, the Council of the District of Columbia voted that the city's new name as a State is to be "Washington, D.C.", and that "D.C." is to stand for "Douglass Commonwealth."

On April 3, 2017, the United States Mint began issuing quarters with an image of Frederick Douglass on the reverse, with the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in the background. The coin is part of the America the Beautiful Quarters series.

On May 20, 2018, Douglass was awarded an honorary law degree from the University of Rochester. The degree, which was accepted by Douglass's great-great-great-grandson, was the first posthumous honorary degree that the university had granted.

The final public lecture of Frederick Douglass was on February 1, 1895, at West Chester University, nineteen days before his death. Today, there is a statue of him on the university campus commemorating this event. The Frederick Douglass Institute has a West Chester University program for advancing multicultural studies across the curriculum and for deepening the intellectual heritage of Douglass.

In New York State there is the "Let's Have Tea" sculpture of Douglass and Susan B. Anthony.

From April 22 to June 14, 2019, the National Gallery of Art had an exhibit titled In the Library: Frederick Douglass Family Materials from the Walter O. Evans Collection

On September 30, 2019, Newcastle University opened the 'Frederick Douglass Centre', a key teaching component for their School of Computing and Business School. Frederick Douglass stayed in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1846 on a street adjacent to the new university campus.

A statue of Douglass located in Rochester, New York's Maplewood Park was vandalized and torn down over the weekend of July 4, 2020.

In 2020, Douglas Park in Chicago, which was named for U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, was renamed Douglass Park, in honor of Frederick and Anna Douglass. In the 1850s the senator had promoted "popular sovereignty" as a middle position on the slavery issue and made "blatant assertions of white superiority." The name change was the result of a multi-year student-led campaign to rename the park.

A plaque on Gilmore Place in Edinburgh, Scotland marks his stay there in 1846. In 2020 a mural of his image was added nearby.

On June 19, 2021, on Boston Street in the Canton neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, two panels were unveiled at the spot where, as it had shortly before been discovered, Douglass had boarded the train that took him to his freedom from enslavement.

On August 18, 2021, the Frederick Douglass Park in Lynn, Massachusetts was dedicated, directly across the street from the site of the Central Square railroad depot where Douglass was forcibly removed from the train in 1841. The park features a bronze bas-relief sculpture of Douglass.

In 2020, the Greater Rochester International Airport was renamed the Frederick Douglass Greater Rochester International Airport.

On January 18, 2023, Governor Wes Moore was sworn in as governor of Maryland on a Bible owned by Douglass.

In popular culture

Film and television

Literature

Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain (1988) is an alternate-history novel in which John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry succeeded and, instead of the Civil War, the Black slaves emancipated themselves in a massive slave revolt. In this history, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman are the revered founders of a Black state created in the Deep South.

Douglass is a major character in the novel How Few Remain (1997) by Harry Turtledove, depicted in an alternate history in which the Confederacy won the Civil War and Douglass must continue his anti-slavery campaign into the 1880s.

Douglass appears in Flashman and the Angel of the Lord (1994) by George MacDonald Fraser.

Douglass, his wife, and his alleged mistress, Ottilie Assing, are the main characters in Jewell Parker Rhodes' Douglass' Women (New York: Atria Books, 2002).

Douglass's time in Ireland is fictionalized in Colum McCann's TransAtlantic (2013).

A comedic representation of Douglass is made in James McBride's 2013 novel The Good Lord Bird.

In 2019, author David W. Blight was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for History for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

In 1938-39, African-American artist Jacob Lawrence created The Frederick Douglass series of narrative paintings. They were part of the historical series started by Lawrence in 1937, which included painted panels about prominent Black historical figures such as Toussaint Louverture and Harriet Tubman. During his preparatory work, Lawrence conducted research at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, drawing primarily from the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). For this series the artist used a multipanel-plus-caption format that allowed him to develop a serial narrative that was not possible to convey by means of traditional portrait or history painting. Instead of reproducing Douglass's original narratives verbatim, Lawrence constructed his own visual and textual narrative in the form of 32 panels painted in tempera and accompanied with Lawrence's own captions. The structure of the painting series is linear and consists of three parts (the slave, the fugitive, the free man) which offer an epic chronicle of Douglass's transformation from slave to leader in the struggle for the liberation of black people. The Frederick Douglass series is currently in the Hampton University Museum.

Other media

In 2019, Douglass was the focus of the exhibition Lessons of the Hour - Frederick Douglass by British artist Isaac Julien, at New York's Metro Pictures Gallery and Memorial Art Gallery.

In August 2022, "American Prophet: Frederick Douglass in His Own Words," a musical starring Cornelius Smith Jr. as Douglass, was performed at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.

A drawing of Frederick Douglass appears on the cover of Ebony magazine, September 1963

One Life: Frederick Douglass Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., June 16, 2023 - April 21, 2024. DeNeen L. Brown, "The photos of Frederick Douglass that helped him fight to end slavery", The Washington Post, July 1, 2023.

Explanatory notes

References

1. ^ Chambers, Veronica; Jamiel Law (ill.) (February 25, 2021). "How Negro History Week Became Black History Month and Why It Matters Now". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331.

2. ^ Gatewood, Willard B. Jr. 1981. "Frederick Douglass and the Building of a 'Wall of Anti-Slavery Fire' 1845-1846. An Essay Review." The Florida Historical Quarterly 59(3):340-344. JSTOR 30147499.

3. Stewart, Roderick M. 1999. "The Claims of Frederick Douglass Philosophically Considered." ^ Frederick Douglass: A Critical Reader, B. E. Lawson and F. M. Kirkland, eds., pp. 155-156. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-0631205784. "Moreover, though he does not make the point explicitly, again the very fact that Douglass is ably disputing this argument on this occasion celebrating a select few's intellect and will (or moral character)-this fact constitutes a living counterexample to the narrowness of the pro-slavery definition of humans."

4. Matlack, James. 1979. "The Autobiographies of Frederick Douglass." ^ Phylon (1960-) 40(1):15-28. doi:10.2307/274419. JSTOR 274419. p. 16: "He spoke too well. ... Since he did not talk, look, or act like a slave (in the eyes of Northern audiences), Douglass was denounced as an imposter."

5. ^ Foner, Philip; Taylor, Yuval, eds. (1999). Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings. Chicago Review Press. p. 629. ISBN 1-55652-349-1. Archived from the original on December 21, 2020. let us have liberty, law, and justice first. Let us have the Constitution, with its thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments, fairly interpreted, faithfully executed, and cheerfully obeyed in the fullness of their spirit and the completeness of their letter.

6. ^ Frederick Douglass (1855). The Anti-Slavery Movement, A Lecture by Frederick Douglass before the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. Press of Lee, Mann & Company, Daily American Office. p. 33. My point here is, first, the Constitution is, according to its reading, an anti-slavery document; and, secondly, to dissolve the Union, as a means to abolish slavery, is about as wise as it would be to burn up this city, in order to get the thieves out of it. But again, we hear the motto, 'no union with slave-holders;' and I answer it, as the noble champion of liberty, N. P. Rogers, answered it with a more sensible motto, namely-' No union with slave-holding.' I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong.

7. Barker, Amanda. [1996]. "^ The Search for Frederick Douglass' Birthplace Archived December 7, 2014, at the Wayback Machine. Choptank River Heritage. Retrieved June 14, 2020. Although Barker's website devoted to the Douglass birthplace states that it could not be found with tour books and guides, that is no longer the case.

8. Barker, Don. February 4, 2014. "^ The Search for Frederick Douglass's Birthplace Archived July 31, 2020, at the Wayback Machine." Choptank River Heritage. Retrieved June 14, 2020.

9. "Frederick Douglass | Museums and Gardens." Talbot Historic Society. 2016. Archived from the original on December 22, 2016. Retrieved December 22, 2016.

10. ^
Frederick Douglass began his own story thusly: "I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot County, Maryland." (Tuckahoe is not a town; it refers to the area west of Tuckahoe Creek in Talbot County.) In successive autobiographies, Douglass gave more precise estimates of when he was born, his final estimate being 1817.

11. ^ February 14: Frederick Douglass Archived June 15, 2020, at the Wayback Machine. The Florida Center for Instructional Technology. US: University of South Florida. 2020.

12. Sterngass, Jon. 2009. ^ Frederick Douglass, (Leaders of the Civil War era). Chelsea House Publishers. ISBN 1604133066. p. 16 Archived June 15, 2020, at the Wayback Machine, 132 Archived June 15, 2020, at the Wayback Machine

13. ^ Field, Kate (February 23, 1895). "Fred. Douglass dead". Kate Field's Washington. 11 (8): 119. Archived from the original on March 21, 2022.

14. Douglass, Frederick. 1845. "^ Chapter VII."

15. Douglass, Frederick. [1881-82] 2003. ^ Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape from Bondage, and His Complete History to the Present Time (Dover Value Editions). p. 50. Courier Dover Publications. ISBN 0486431703.

16. ^ Appiah, Kwame Anthony. [2000] 2004. "Introduction." In 'Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave' & 'Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl'. New York: Modern Library. pp. xiii, 4.

17. ^ Douglass, Frederick (1855). My Bondage and My Freedom (1st ed.). New York and Auburn: Miller, Orton & Mulligan. p. 58.

18. ^ Blight, David W., Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, p. 68.

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21. ""JUNETEENTH|Historic Panels Commemorating Frederick Douglass' Escape Unveiled In Canton"". June 19, 2021. Archived from the original on June 20, 2021.

22. ""Panels honoring Frederick Douglass to be unveiled at Canton waterfront"". June 9, 2021. Archived from the original on June 24, 2021.

23. ""Historic Panels Commemorate Frederick Douglass' Escape From Slavery In Canton"". Archived from the original on June 24, 2021.

24. ^

25. ^ Lee, Maurice S., ed. (2009). The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass. Cambridge University Press. p. 69.

26. ^ Blight, David (2020). Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Simon & Schuster. p. 514. ISBN 978-1-4165-9032-3.

27. ^ Adam Gopnik, "American Prophet: The gifts of Frederick Douglass", The New Yorker, October 15, 2018, pp. 81-82

28. ^

29. ^ Lee, Maurice S., ed. (2009). The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass. Cambridge University Press. p. 63.

30. ^

31. Douglass, Frederick. [1881] 2008. ^ Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Cosimo, Inc., p. 149 ISBN 978-1605203997.

32. ^ The full text of Page:My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).djvu/411 at Wikisource

33. Reprinted in ^ Blassingame, John W.; McKivigan, John R., eds. (1979). The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One-Speeches, Debates, and Interviews. Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press. p. 57.

34. Douglass, Frederick. [1885] 2003. ^ My Bondage and My Freedom: Part I - Life as a Slave, Part II - Life as a Freeman, introduction by James McCune Smith, edited by J. Stauffer. New York: Random House. ISBN 0812970314. p. 371 Archived January 31, 2017, at the Wayback Machine

35. ^ The Liberator, 27 March 1846 Archived May 20, 2021, at the Wayback Machine; reprinted in Philip Foner, ed., Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1950), p. 138.

36. Frederick Douglass letter to ^ William Lloyd Garrison quoted in Christine Kinealy ed. (2018), Frederick Douglass and Ireland: In His Own Words, Volume II. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-0429505058. pp. 67-72.

37. ^

38. ^ Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution, New York: HarperCollins, 2006, pp. 415-21.

39. ^ Fenton, Laurence (2014). Frederick Douglass in Ireland : the 'Black O'Connell'. Cork: Collins Press. pp. 131, 151. ISBN 978-1848891968. OCLC 869789226.

40. ^ "Jerry Rescue Celebration". Anti-Slavery Bugle. Salem, Ohio. October 14, 1854. p. 2.

41. ^ U.S. Constitution, Article I, section 2.

42. ^ Rebeiro, footnotes 51 and 67.

43. ^ (1860) FREDERICK DOUGLASS, "THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES: IS IT PRO-SLAVERY OR ANTI-SLAVERY?", full text. Abridged

44. ^ Stanton, 1997, p. 85.

45. Foner, p. 600.

46. ^

47. ^

48. ^ Underground Railroad, US Department of Interior, National Park Service, Denver Service Center. Diane Publishing, February 1, 1995, p. 168.

49. ^ "High Treason!". Franklin Repository. Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. August 24, 1859. p. 5. Archived from the original on April 13, 2021 - via newspapers.com.

50. ^ Drescher, Seymour (1995). "Servile Insurrection and John Brown's Body in Europe". In Finkelman, Paul (ed.). His Soul Goes Marching On. Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia. p. 275. ISBN 978-0813915364.

51. ^ Douglass, Frederick (November 11, 1859) [October 31, 1859]. "Letter from Frederick Douglass". The Liberator. Boston, Massachusetts. p. 1. Archived from the original on April 13, 2021 - via newspapers.com.

52. ^ "Supposed Search for Fred. Douglass". The New York Times. October 27, 1859. p. 8. Archived from the original on April 13, 2021 - via newspapers.com.

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54. Frederick Douglass (1860), ^ "The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?" - via BlackPast, March 15, 2012. Retrieved August 29, 2020.

55. Douglass, Frederick (1881). John Brown. An address by Frederick Douglass, at the fourteenth anniversary of Storer College, Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, May 30, 1881. Dover, New Hampshire: Dover, N.H., Morning Star job printing house. pp. 3-4.

56. ^ John Stauffer; Zoe Trodd; Celeste-Marie Bernier; Henry Louis Gates Jr.; Kenneth B. Morris Jr. (2015). Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century's Most Photographed American (revised ed.). Liveright (imprint of Norton). p. 320. ISBN 978-0871404688. Archived from the original (hardcover) on August 6, 2016.

57. ^ David Brooks (August 2, 2016). "How Artists Change the World". The New York Times. Archived from the original on August 5, 2016.

58. ^ "Picture This: Frederick Douglass Was The Most Photographed Man Of His Time - interview by Michel Martin of John Stauffer, author of Picturing Frederick Douglass". NPR.org. NPR. December 13, 2015. Archived from the original on May 4, 2016.

59. ^ "Black man going to Congress". Weekly Raleigh Register. Raleigh, North Carolina. July 5, 1854. p. 1. Archived from the original on April 21, 2022 - via newspapers.com.

60. ^ "The Black and White Douglas". Wabash Courier. Terre Haute, Indiana. July 22, 1854 - via Hoosier State Chronicles.

61. ^ "F. Douglass in Congress". Anti-Slavery Bugle. Salem, Ohio. August 5, 1854. p. 1.

62. ^ George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984, p. 132.

63. ^ Richard H. Pildes, "Democracy, Anti-Democracy, and the Canon" Archived November 21, 2018, at the Wayback Machine, Constitutional Commentary, Vol. 17, 2000, pp. 12-13. Retrieved March 10, 2008.

64. Richard Reid, ^ "The Gloria Rackley-Blackwell story" Archived July 27, 2019, at the Wayback Machine The Times and Democrat (February 22, 2011). Retrieved June 3, 2011.

65. ^ Wilkerson, Isabel, The Warmth of Other Suns (2010), p. 40.

66. ^ Louis Martin Sears (May 1941). "Frederick Douglass and the Mission to Haiti, 1889-1891". The Hispanic American Historical Review. 21 (2): 222-238. doi:10.2307/2507394. JSTOR 2507394.

67. ^ "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. April 15, 2008.

68. ^ Field, Kate (April 20, 1895). "A Life of Contrasts". Kate Field's Washington. 11 (16): 253-254. Archived from the original on March 22, 2022.

69. Finkenbine, Roy E. 2000. "^ Douglass, Frederick Archived December 24, 2016, at archive.today." American National Biography. Retrieved on March 16, 2016.

70. ^ "Holy Women, Holy Men: Celebrating the Saints" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on April 10, 2021.

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72. ^ Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1573929638.

73. ^ Burlingame, Michael, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, vol. 1, p. 526, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008; Unedited manuscript, p. 1446. Archived September 1, 2021, at the Wayback Machine

74. ^ Sippell, Margeaux (August 2, 2019). "Daveed Diggs to Play Frederick Douglass in Ethan Hawke's Showtime Limited Series 'The Good Lord Bird'". TheWrap. Archived from the original on December 5, 2019.

75. ^ "Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches | Official Website for the HBO Series". HBO.com.

76. Carson, Saul. November 3, 1946. "Negro's Apotheosis." ^ New York Times Book Review. pp. 7, 36.

77. Olende, Ken. December 1, 2007. "^ Frederick Douglass and 'Riversmeet': connecting 19th century struggles Archived August 16, 2008, at the Wayback Machine." Socialist Worker.

78. ^ Lyons, Joel (August 21, 2013). "James McBride on 'The Good Lord Bird'". Daily News. New York. Archived from the original on August 25, 2013.

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80. ^ "The Making of a Man" (mp3). Destination Freedom - via Internet Archive Digital Library. & "The Key to Freedom" (mp3). Destination Freedom - via Internet Archive Digital Library.

Further reading

Primary sources

Douglass, Frederick (1845). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office.

- (1855). My Bondage and My Freedom: Part I. Life as a Slave, Part II. Life as a Freeman. New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan.

- (1881). Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. Hartford, Conn.: Park Publishing Co.

- (1892). Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. Boston: De Wolfe & Fiske Co. (updated edition of 1881 version).

- (1950). The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. New York: International Publishers.

Gregory, James Monroe (1893). Frederick Douglass the Orator: Containing an Account of His Life; His Eminent Public Services; His Brilliant Career as Orator; Selections from His Speeches and Writings. Willey Book Company.

Stauffer, John, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier (2015). Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century's Most Photographed American (revised ed.). Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Newspaper and magazine articles

Scholarship

Balkin, Jack M. and Levinson, Sanford (2023). "Frederick Douglass as Constitutionalist". Maryland Law Review, forthcoming.

Barnes, L. Diane. Frederick Douglass: Reformer and Statesman (Routledge, 2012).

Blight, David W. (1989). Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.

Bromell, Nick. The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass (Duke University Press, 2021).

Buccola, Nicholas. The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty (NYU Press, 2013). online

Chaffin, Tom (2014). Giant's Causeway: Frederick Douglass's Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press.

Chesebrough, David B. Frederick Douglass: Oratory from Slavery (Greenwood, 1998).

Child, Lydia Maria (1865). "Frederick Douglass" in Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

Colaiaco, James A. (2015). Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July. New York: St Martin's Press.

Dilbeck, D. H. Frederick Douglass: America's Prophet (UNC Press Books, 2018) online

Douglas, Janet. "A Cherished Friendship: Julia Griffiths Crofts and Frederick Douglass." Slavery & Abolition 33.2 (2012): 265-274.

Fee Jr., Frank E. "To No One More Indebted: Frederick Douglass and Julia Griffiths, 1849-63." Journalism History 37.1 (2011): 12-26. online

Finkelman, Paul (2016). "Frederick Douglass's Constitution: From Garrisonian Abolitionist to Lincoln Republican". Missouri Law Review, vol. 81, no. 1, pp. 1-73.

Finkenbine, Roy E. (2000). "Douglass, Frederick". American National Biography. doi:10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1500186. Brief scholarly biography.

Foster, A. Kristen. "'We Are Men!' Frederick Douglass and the Fault Lines of Gendered Citizenship." Journal of the Civil War Era 1.2 (2011): 143-175. [1]

Golden, Timothy J. (2021). Frederick Douglass and the Philosophy of Religion: An Interpretation of Narrative, Art, and the Political. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Gougeon, Len (2012). "Militant Abolitionism: Douglass, Emerson, and the Rise of the Anti-Slave". New England Quarterly, 85.4: 622-657.

Hamilton, Cynthia S. (2005). "Models of Agency: Frederick Douglass and 'The Heroic Slave'". American Antiquarian Society.

Hawley, Michael C. (2022). "Light or Fire? Frederick Douglass and the Orator's Dilemma". American Journal of Political Science.

Henderson, Rodger C. (December 1, 2006). "Native Americans and Frederick Douglass". Oxford African American Studies Center.

Huggins, Nathan Irvin (1980. Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (Library of American Biography). Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Kilbride, Daniel. "What did Africa Mean to Frederick Douglass?". Slavery & Abolition 36.1 (2015): 40-62. online

Lampe, Gregory P. (1998). Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.

Lee, Maurice S., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass (2009), essays by experts, with emphasis on historiography.

Levine, Robert S. (2016). The Lives of Frederick Douglass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Levine, Robert S. (2021). The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

McClure, Kevin R. "Frederick Douglass' use of comparison in his Fourth of July oration: A textual criticism." Western Journal of Communication 64.4 (2000): 425-444. online

McMillen, Sally Gregory (2008). Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women's Rights Movement. Oxford University Press.

Mieder, Wolfgang (2001). "No Struggle, No Progress": Frederick Douglass and His Proverbial Rhetoric for Civil Rights. Peter Lang Pub Incorporated.

Mindich, David T. Z. "Understanding Frederick Douglass: Toward a New Synthesis Approach to the Birth of Modern American Journalism." Journalism History 26.1 (2000): 15-22. online

Muller, John (2012). Frederick Douglass in Washington, D.C.: The Lion of Anacostia. Charleston, S.C.: The History Press. ISBN 978-1609495770.

Oakes, James (2007). The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Quarles, Benjamin (1948). Frederick Douglass. Washington: Associated Publishers.

Ray, Angela G. "Frederick Douglass on the Lyceum Circuit: Social Assimilation, Social Transformation?" Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5.4 (2002): 625-647. summary

Rebeiro, Bradley. "Frederick Douglass and the Original Originalists". Brigham Young University Law Review, vol. 48 (2023)

Root, Damon. (2020). A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution. Potomac Books Inc. ISBN 978-1640122352.

Sandefur, Timothy. (2008). "Douglass, Frederick (1818-1895)". In Hamowy, Ronald (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; Cato Institute. pp. 126-127. doi:10.4135/9781412965811.n80. ISBN 978-1412965804. LCCN 2008009151. OCLC 750831024.

Selby, Gary S. "The limits of accommodation: Frederick Douglass and the Garrisonian abolitionists." Southern Journal of Communication 66.1 (2000): 52-66.

Stephens, Gregory (1997). "Frederick Douglass' Multiracial Abolitionism-Antagonistic Cooperation & Redeemable Ideals in the July 5 Speech". Communication Studies. 48 (3): 175-194. doi:10.1080/10510979709368500.

Sundstrom, Ronald. (2017). "Frederick Douglass". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

Sweeney, Fionnghuala. Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Liverpool University Press, 2007) online.

Vogel, Todd, ed. (2001). The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Washington, Booker T. (1906). Frederick Douglass. London, UK: Hodder & Stoughton. Online Historian John Hope Franklin wrote that Washington's biography of Douglass "has been attributed largely to Washington's friend, S. Laing Williams". Introduction to Three Negro Classics, New York: Avon Books (1965), p. 17.

Webber, Thomas L. (1978). Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831-1865. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Woodson, C. G. (1915). The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861: A History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

For young readers

Miller, William. 1995. Frederick Douglass: The Last Day of Slavery, illustrated by C. Lucas. Lee & Low Books.

Walker, David F.; Smyth, Damon; Louise, Marissa. 2018. The Life of Frederick Douglass: A graphic narrative of a slave's journey from bondage to freedom. Ten Speed Press.

Weidt, Maryann N. 2001. Voice of Freedom: A Story about Frederick Douglass, illustrated by J. Reeves. Lerner publications.

Documentary films and videos

External links

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Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 1817 or 1818 - February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, during which he gained fame for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings.

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From India to Alabama...

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The White Citizens Council of Birmingham, Alabama, called it a plot. As musicologist John Haines explains, members of the group, which would become known for its 1956 attack on musician Nat "King" Cole, were angered over the "sexual overtones" of rock music, decrying it as a devious plot to infiltrate the minds of white teenagers. They were joined in their outrage by Houston's Juvenile Delinquency and Crime Commission, which sent a list of nearly 100 songs that they deemed "objectionable" to local DJs, explains sociologist Theresa A. Martinez. The list contained only recordings by Black artists. Despite this effort to suppress the sounds, rock music (and its older cousins R&B and blues) was popular with white teens.

"They'd put a rope in the middle of the floor. The blacks on the one side, the whites on the other [...]. Then, hell, the rope would come down, and they'd all be dancing together."

As Martinez argues, there's a certain imagery that pervades the early rock era. It's "a time of bobby socks, sock hops, and the Fonz," but beneath that obviously white culture, there ran a counter-narrative. Black and white kids were not only spinning the same records as one another in their homes, but they were dancing to it, together and in public. As Ralph Bass, a producer for Chess Records, explained, "they'd put a rope in the middle of the floor. The blacks on the one side, the whites on the other [...]. Then, hell, the rope would come down, and they'd all be dancing together."

This was the problem.

Radio stations refused to play rock, and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers came out against it, with objections full of "racist but also disdainful classist overtones." But, as Martinez describes, the major labels did the most harm. They knew that young consumers were buying the music, but because of their reluctance to record it, rock "was [a] popular market in which they had no footprint." Their solution was to buy the rights to popular R&B songs, but have white artists perform them, which "severely damaged the success of black music artists." All the same, some artists managed to break through this deliberately placed barrier.

Chuck Berry was able to cross over in ways that, in context, are remarkable. As Martinez notes, "In an era when black music artists were relegated to an obviously racialized, disparagingly termed category of 'race music' in America, [he] arose as a major music artist among black and white audiences." He managed this feat both because of his guitar talent and his lyricism. Joining Berry in crossover appeal was Little Richard, whose style, stage presence, and "beyond suggestive" lyrics created "an oppositional culture to the normative standards of the time." His popularity was tied to some people not understanding these suggestive lyrics as well as to the subtle thrill others felt from hearing someone getting away with them.

So what about a white artist performing the same music in much the same way as Black artists? That was a job for Elvis Presley. As Martinez notes, Presley "developed at least part of his ethos and performance style from black culture." And in Presley, record companies saw that a white artist "who could deliver an emotionally authentic sound akin to black artists was the going trend." This didn't sit well in conservative corners of the country, and Presley, "was disparaged, vilified, and scorned by the national press, government officials, religious leaders, and many white parents." However, Martinez writes, Presley's status as the "king" of rock was certainly aided by his whiteness, despite the disapproval of some.

Early rock had more than its fair share of racism, but there were artists who subtly (and not so subtly) pushed against it. As Martinez demonstrates, these three artists offer "a form of oppositional culture and...a counter-narrative in the 1950s early rock and roll era."
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Race, Rock, and Breaking Barriers - JSTOR Daily

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The White Citizens Council of Birmingham, Alabama, called it a plot. As musicologist John Haines explains, members of the group, which would become known for its 1956 attack on musician Nat "King" Cole, were angered over the "sexual overtones" of rock music, decrying it as a devious plot to infiltrate the minds of white teenagers.