Darkmatter

Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey on February 1818.

He was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman who was born into slavery.

His mother was of Native American ancestry and his father was of African and European descent.

He was separated from his mother as an infant.

He escaped slavery at age 20 and became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York.

Anna Murray, a free black woman from Baltimore he met while in captivity with the Aulds, married him in September 1838.
They had five children together.

He published the first of his five autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
He wrote: 

“From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom.”
“Thus is slavery the enemy of both the slave and the slaveholder.”

After the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, he continued to push for equality and human rights until his death in 1895.

He died after suffering a heart attack on his way home from a meeting of the National Council of Women, in Washington, D.C.

He was also an advocate for woman rights and specifically the right of women to vote.

His work served as an inspiration to the civil rights movement of the 1960's.