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Douglass, Frederick
5 articles on Douglass, Frederick
Douglass, Frederick
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 13063 Includes: From Slave to Fugitive | Several Lives in One | Heroic Life | Orator and Writer | Thinker | Voice Falls Silent | Bibliography | Autobiographies | Collections of Douglass's Writings, Editorials, and Speeches | Collections of Essays about Douglass | Biographies and Other Critical Works(b. February 1818; d. 20 February 1895),
the most important African American leader and intellectual of the nineteenth century. Frederick Douglass lived for twenty years as a slave and nearly nine years as a fugitive slave. From the 1840s to his death in 1895 he attained international fame as an abolitionist, editor, orator, statesman, and the author of three autobiographies that became classics of the slave narrative tradition. Douglass lived to see the Emancipation of the slaves during the Civil War and made a major contribution to interpreting the meaning of those epochal events. He labored for the establishment of black civil rights and witnessed their betrayal during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. He advocated women's rights long before they were achieved. It took nearly a century ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 2814 Includes: Early Years and Experience of Slavery | Moving to Baltimore and Learning to Read | Escape from Slavery and Abolitionism | Other Antebellum Reform Activities | During the Civil War and Reconstruction | Later Life | Conclusion | Bibliography1817?–1895
Principal African American spokesperson, abolitionist, reformer, author, and orator during the nineteenth century. Frederick Douglass was more than a great African American leader. He was, in the words of his biographer William S. McFeely, “one of the giants of nineteenth-century America.” He was a man driven by his anger at injustice, McFeely observed, a man who “never ran away from anything”—except the bondage of slavery. Even in that, he took flight not simply to escape but to engage. After gaining his freedom, the former slave turned in his tracks and confronted the institution head-on.Douglass played a prominent role in nineteenth-century reform movements, not only through his abolitionism but also in his support for women's rights and black suffrage. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he stayed true to his principles, remaining steadfast in ...
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Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 3298 Includes: Further Reading(Feb. 1818–20 Feb. 1895), abolitionist, civil rights activist, and reform journalist, was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey near Easton, Maryland, the son of Harriet Bailey, a slave, and an unidentified white man. Although a slave, he spent the first six years of his life in the cabin of his maternal grandparents, with only a few stolen nighttime visits by his mother. His real introduction to bondage came in 1824, when he was brought to the nearby wheat plantation of Colonel Edward Lloyd. Two years later he was sent to Baltimore to labor in the household of Hugh and Sophia Auld, where he remained for the next seven years. In spite of laws against slave literacy, Fredericksecretly taught himself to read and write. He began studying discarded newspapers and learned of the growing national debate over slavery. And ...
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Source: The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
Word Count: 7050 Includes: The Abolition Movement | Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave | My Bondage and My Freedom | Douglass's “Philosophy” of Slavery | The Columbian Orator | The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass | The American Ordeal of “Autobiography” | Selected Works | Further ReadingAny writer attempting an overview of Frederick Douglass's life and work confronts an embarrassment of riches: Douglass himself undertook the task not once but three times—in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (1881), a volume itself reprinted with additional material in 1892. Each book is rewarding in its own right, each sums up a distinct phase in Douglass's long and astonishingly productive career, and together they give us an indispensable record of the nineteenth century: of the abolition movement; the meteoric rise of the Republican Party; the Civil War, Reconstruction; and beginning in the mid-1870s, the bitter forfeiture of the great emancipating enterprise that the better angels of our nature (as Lincoln might have ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 1590(1818–1895), orator, journalist, editor, and autobiographer. Frederick Douglass, author of the most influential African American text of his era, rose through the ranks of the antislavery movement in the 1840s and 1850s to become the most electrifying speaker and commanding writer produced by black America in the nineteenth century. From the outbreak of the Civil War until his death, Douglass was generally recognized as the premier African American leader and spokesman for his people. Douglass's writing was devoted primarily to the creation of a heroic image of himself that would inspire in African Americans the belief that color need not be a permanent bar to their achievement of the American dream, while reminding whites of their obligation as Americans to support free and equal access to that dream for Americans of all races. ...
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