Who was Frederick Douglass?
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, around 1818. He secretly taught himself to read and escaped to the North in 1838.
His 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, became a bestseller and one of the most powerful documents of the abolitionist movement. In 1847 he founded the anti-slavery newspaper The North Star.
Douglass advised President Lincoln, recruited Black soldiers for the Union Army, supported women's suffrage, and later served as U.S. Minister Resident to Haiti. He died in Washington, D.C., in 1895.