Frederick Douglass: The Real Story

Who was Frederick Douglass? According to http://www.who2.com/bio/frederick-douglass and http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/bio.html, Frederick Douglass was born as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in February 1818 in Maryland to a black slave woman and an unknown white male, who was probably his mother's slave master. When he was 20, he escaped to New York to obtain his freedom. In order to keep his freedom, he changed his name from Frederick Bailey to Frederick Douglass. He chose this name from a character in the book from The Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott. This way, he was able to keep his freedom and marry a free black woman named Anna Murray in 1838. Frederick and Anna had four children between the years of 1839 and 1844. During these times, Douglass became an aid abolitionist for black suffrage and pushed to end slavery. He wrote What to the Slave is the Fourth of July on July 5, 1852 as a protest to July 4th. Douglass' wife Anna died in 1882, and two years later in 1884 he remarried, this time to his white secretary named Helen Pitts. Douglass' works were used as propaganda for the civil war in order to get African American slaves to fight against the south. Douglass died in 1895 from heart failure. This was the same year that Booker T. Washington became prominent by giving his Atlanta Exposition speech. Douglass is often referred to as one of the South's most famous examples of the region's mixed racial heritage.

Side-note: The year Douglass wrote What to the Slave is the Fourth of July, Phi Mu was founded and publicly announced. I thought that was very cool.