Frederick Douglass

‘I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted,” Frederick Douglass said.

Awkwardly referred to recently by a certain Washington official, Douglass is of keen interest during Black History Month. He’s part of a steady progression that went to Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks — and to too many others to include here.

Born in Maryland, the son of a black mother and an unidentified white father, Douglass (1817-95) spent his first two decades as a domestic servant, field worker and shipyard laborer.

He fled to the North to escape his bonds, and settled in New Bedford where he worked as a laborer. When his remarks before an antislavery convention thoroughly stirred the audience, he became a traveling agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Some claimed he was too eloquent to have ever been a slave. Hartford’s Park Publishing brought out his autobiography, a blunt description of Southern slave life, in 1845.

“Mr. Severe was rightly named: he was a cruel man,” Douglass wrote of one master. “I have seen him whip a woman, causing the blood to run half an hour at the time; and this, too, in the midst of her crying children, pleading for their mother’s release.” Douglass, too, felt the lash, though one slave owner thought the better of giving him another beating after he once turned the tables.

Jarring is his account of one mistress, “a woman of the kindest heart and finest feelings,” who upon her marriage was first exposed to household slaves. She thought to treat them as human beings, until her husband caught her teaching Douglass (who in those days went by the name Frederick Bailey) the alphabet. “That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon.”

Douglass helped recruit soldiers for the Connecticut 29th Regiment of Colored Volunteers in 1864. 

A popular public speaker, Douglass’s platform appearances didn’t end with the Civil War or President Abraham Lincoln’s death. He continued his pleas for full civil rights for his people. He also became active in the women’s suffrage movement.

His talk in Pittsfield, Mass., in December 1865 on “Assassination and Its Lessons” was marred by an incident afterward at the American House.

Bigots refused to sit at the same table in the dining room as Douglass. Proprietor Quackenbush offered to serve the orator in his room. Douglass refused, paid his bill and took a room at the United States Hotel.

Douglass had an admirable portrait taken by the Hartford photographer Stephen H. Waite, while on a lecture tour. Cartes-des-visite copies sold in great numbers as souvenirs.

“Where justice is denied,” Douglass once said, “where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”

The writer is author of “Black Stereotypes in Popular Series Fiction, 1851-1955: Jim Crow-Era Authors and Their Characters)” (2015).