Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey along with Abraham Lincoln were great Americans during the 19th century.
Good folks like FD are unfortunately born into slavery, but unlike many others, that did not stop him. He escaped to the North in 1838, and quickly became an activist, writer, and lecturer, pursuing all three without rest until he died in 1895.
Douglass’s long life and prodigious body of work were divided by the Civil War. Though he campaigned for other causes, especially women’s rights, until 1865 he devoted himself with unwavering intensity to a single goal: the end of slavery.
He described and denounced it from personal experience, starting in 1845 with the first of his three autobiographies,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which makes the physical and moral horror of slavery unbearably real. He exposed the hypocrisy of America’s democratic rhetoric in scathing lectures such as “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” delivered on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass regarded the Southern Rebellion and the bloody war that followed as divine deliverance from an evil that had begun to seem intractable. He lobbied President Lincoln to arm Black soldiers, and then personally recruited them to fight. This was the era of Frederick Douglass the American prophet—a Jeremiah in the pulpit, the lecture hall, and the columns of newspapers and magazines, calling down God’s punishment on a land that made claims of liberty and equality for all but refused to acknowledge the basic humanity of nearly 4 million souls.
https://www.theatlantic.com/author/frederick-douglass/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Douglass
The Forgotten History of Black Prohibitionism
Established history tells us that the temperance movement was driven by white evangelicals set out to discipline America’s Black and immigrant communities. Established history is wrong.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/06/forgotten-black-histo…