INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Today is the day we acknowledge as the birthday of the greatest African-American of the 19th Century. 

1. When the historian Carter Woodson inaugurated Negro History Week in 1926, he had it coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Woodson placed Douglass’ birthday on Feb. 14.
2. He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, but changed his name when he got his freedom. A friend suggested he adopt the name of a character from Sir Walter Scott’s “The Lady of the Lake”.
3. A turning point in his life came when he was 16. He fought back against a slave-breaker and won.  It increased his self-esteem and his desire for freedom.
4. The wife of a slave-owner taught him the alphabet, but was forced to desist by her husband. He learned to read by carrying a book on his errands to town and bribing white kids to teach him passages by offering them bread.  Later, he taught other slaves how to read the Bible.
5. In 1838, he escaped with the help of his future wife Anna. Anna was a free laundress who gave him some money and a sailor’s suit that he used to take a train to the North.  She died in 1882.
6. His first autobiography became one of the most famous books of the 19^th Century. “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” was published in 1845.  Because it made hi famous, he moved to Ireland and England for two years to escape slave-catchers who desperately wanted to get him.  He went on to write two more biographies.
7. He was the only African-American to attend the Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights. “In respect to political rights, we hold that women to be justly entitled to all we claim for men.”  In 1866, he co-founded the American Equal Rights Association with Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other suffragists.
8. During the Civil War, he met with Lincoln and pushed for the recruitment of black soldiers. He specifically had a role in the creation of the 54^th Massachusetts Regiment.  Two of his sons fought with the famous unit and participated in the attack on Fort Wagner (although they do not appear in the movie “Glory”, but he does).  Then he spoke out for equal pay and merit-based promotions.
9. In 1872, he became the first African-American to be nominated for Vice President. He was the running mate of Victoria Woodhull of the Equal Rights Party.  Douglass had not wanted the nomination and did not acknowledge it.
10. In 1877, while he was visiting Washington, his home in Rochester, NY was burned to the ground, destroying much of his possessions. Hundreds of his letters and copies of his newspaper “The North Star” were lost.
11. He held federal positions under five Presidents – Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, and Benjamin Harrison.
12. He was probably the most photographed American of the 19^th Century. There are 160 portraits of him.  He called photography the “democratic art” and valued its accuracy in portraying African-Americans as human beings.  He himself refused to ever be photographed smiling as he refused to play the stereotyped happy slave.
13. When Anna died, he remarried a white abolitionist named Helen Pitts. She was 20 years younger.  The marriage was criticized by both whites and blacks, but it was a happy one and lasted eleven years until his death in 1895.

https://www.npca.org/articles/1736-10-facts-you-might-not-know-about-frederick-douglass-in-honor-of-his-200th

https://www.historyhit.com/facts-about-frederick-douglass/

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/539306/facts-about-frederick-douglass