Frederick Douglass and the American Dream

Frederick Douglass (1818-95) was an author, lecturer, activist, and statesman who was born into slavery in rural Maryland. After being sent to Baltimore at the age of seven, he secretly learned to read and began questioning the legitimacy of slavery. When he was 20, he escaped to New York on the Underground Railroad and from there moved to Massachusetts, where he was recruited into the abolition movement by William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the antislavery newspaper The Liberator. In 1845, Douglass published The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and gave a lecture tour in Great Britain. Upon his return, he moved to Rochester, New York, where he repudiated Garrison's belief that the Constitution was a pro-slavery document. In partnership with New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith, he began publishing his own newspaper, and revised and extended the Narrative into My Bondage and My Freedom.When the Civil War broke out, Douglass helped recruit black soldiers into the Union Army and met repeatedly with President Abraham Lincoln. After the war, Douglass became United States marshal for the District of Columbia and was later appointed minister to Haiti. He continued lecturing throughout, supporting stronger protections for civil rights in the South and denouncing the rise of Jim Crow in the period after Reconstruction. In 1884, he shocked the nation by marrying a white woman, Helen Pitts, a former abolitionist who had taught freedmen in schools in the South. He became a mentor to Paul Laurence Dunbar and Ida Wells, and he died in 1895.