Frederick Douglass learned to read after his enslaver forbade it
When Sophia Auld began teaching twelve-year-old Frederick the alphabet, her husband stopped her, warning that literacy would make an enslaved boy want freedom. Douglass later called it the first real antislavery lecture he ever heard. He kept learning in secret, escaped in 1838 and became the century's leading voice for Black civil rights.
He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey around February 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, probably in his grandmother's cabin. He never knew his exact birthday. His mother was of African descent; his father was white, possibly her enslaver, and according to David Blight's 2018 biography Douglass searched all his life for his name. Separated from his mother in infancy, as was customary there, he was raised by his enslaved grandmother Betsy Bailey and his free grandfather Isaac. His mother, living about 12 miles away, visited only a few times before dying when he was seven.
At six he was taken to the Wye House plantation, where Aaron Anthony was overseer. After Anthony's death in 1826 he passed to Lucretia Auld, who sent him to Baltimore to serve Hugh and Sophia Auld. Once Sophia turned against his schooling, snatching away a newspaper and hiding even her Bible, he picked up reading from white children in the neighbourhood.
After his escape from Maryland he rose to national prominence among abolitionists in Massachusetts and New York. His speeches and writings were so powerful that allies held him up as living proof against the proslavery claim that enslaved people lacked the intellect to live as free citizens. His 1845 Narrative became a bestseller and advanced abolition, as did My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855; a third autobiography followed.
Douglass broke with William Lloyd Garrison and came to read the Constitution as an antislavery document. When radicals chanting no union with slaveholders attacked his willingness to talk with slave owners, he defended building alliances across racial and ideological lines. Around 1883 he returned to Talbot County to buy land that mattered to him. He died on February 20, 1895.
Source: Frederick Douglass
