Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass, born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey around 14 February 1818 and living until 20 February 1895, was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer and statesman described as the most important leader of the movement for African American civil rights in the nineteenth century. After escaping slavery in Maryland in 1838 he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining fame for his oratory and his sharp antislavery writing that stood, in the eyes of contemporaries, as a living rebuttal to the claim that enslaved people lacked the intellectual capacity for independent citizenship. He wrote three autobiographies describing his life in slavery and after, beginning with the 1845 bestseller Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and continuing through My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855 and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, first published in 1881. Following the Civil War he campaigned actively for the rights of freed slaves, supported women's suffrage, and held several public offices, and without his knowledge or consent he became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States, as Victoria Woodhull's running mate on the Equal Rights Party ticket. Douglass believed in building alliances across racial and ideological lines and in an antislavery reading of the United States Constitution, a position that put him at odds with William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists who rejected any dialogue with slaveholders.