PBS.org | The son of a slave woman and an unknown white man, “Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey” was born in February of 1818 on Maryland’s eastern shore. He spent his early years with his grandparents and with an aunt, seeing his mother only four or five times before her death when he was seven. (All Douglass knew of his father was that he was white.) During this time he was exposed to the degradations of slavery, witnessing firsthand brutal whippings and spending much time cold and hungry. When he was eight he was sent to Baltimore to live with a ship carpenter named Hugh Auld. There he learned to read and first heard the words abolition and abolitionists. “Going to live at Baltimore,” Douglass would later say, “laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity.”
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass – free audio book
http://youtu.be/swYQ_-TNutI
Douglass served as an adviser to President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. What does an ex-slave have to say about Independence Day?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soSaPyu6JFw
Read the entire speech “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro”.
