Meet Frederick Douglass: Literacy as the Road to Freedom

The lesson that was stopped

Born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, around 1818, Douglass was taught the beginnings of reading by Sophia Auld, the wife of the man who held him — until her husband stopped it, warning that learning would make him unfit to be a slave. Douglass took the objection as instruction. He carried on in secret, trading bread to poor white boys in the street for lessons and reading whatever he could get.

He escaped in September 1838, travelling north in a borrowed sailor's uniform with papers that were not his, and reached New York in about a day.

The book, and the danger of it

His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave was published in 1845 and sold enormously. It also identified him precisely — names, places, the man who legally claimed him — which made him a target for recapture. He sailed for Britain and Ireland, lectured there for two years, and supporters raised the money to purchase his legal freedom before he returned.

In 1847 he founded his own newspaper, The North Star. Its motto argued that right is of no sex and truth of no colour: he campaigned for women's suffrage as well, and was at Seneca Falls in 1848.

The Fourth of July

On 5 July 1852, invited to speak in Rochester on American independence, he asked his audience what the Fourth of July meant to the slave — and answered that to him it revealed, more than any other day, the injustice and cruelty of which he was the constant victim. He was not a guest softening the occasion. He used it.

He went on to advise Lincoln on the enlistment and treatment of Black soldiers, and lived to 1895 as the most photographed American of the century — a man acutely aware that his own image was an argument.

Why they belong at your table

Seat him when you are deciding whether to ask politely. He is the clearest voice at this table on the difference between being granted something and taking it, and he pays for the distinction with his own history.