Frederick Douglass
...someone hears the phrase people assume that it's a rapper from the projects or some trailer trash pop singer, but those can't hold a single candle to the rise of Frederick Douglass. A slave born child from a broken (and shrinking) family, owned and moved from owner to owner and he had to learn from the streets (literally). Life wasn't easy for this kid, but as time went on, his knowledge grew, and his ambition for abolition sparked, he would find his place in history as one of the greats.
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey (before he changed it) was born on February in 1818, in the town of Tuckahoe (funny story
Tuckahoe was named that because some farmer took another farmer's hoe. Get it? "took a hoe", Tuckahoe) in Talbot county on the eastern shores of Maryland. Long after that however, Douglass died of a massive heart attack on February 20, 1895 in Washington, D.C. (kind of weird how I start with his birth and immediately jump to his death, right?) His body remained in state for a public open casket viewing for ordinary people and school children who received the day off to mourn (like JFK or Princess Diana).
As I have stated before, young Freddy had a broken family life. In the time period involving slave trades, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons were often separated from one another. Because Frederick's mother, Harriett Bailey, worked on a different field, she left Frederick in the custody of his grandparents, Isaac and Betsy Bailey, after giving birth to him. Being a slave meant there wasn't any time off for family visits, leaving Freddy few times to be with his mother. "[He] never saw [his] mother
more than four or five times in [his] life, and each of those time was very short, and at night".1(p. 16) Douglass's father is unknown, but he believed that his father was white. It was rumored to him that his father was his master, but...
View Full Essay