Frederick Douglass at 200

This February marks the 200-year anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s birth. In commemoration, the Gilder Lehrman Institute is featuring the great African American orator and abolitionist throughout the year. Activist for Equality: Frederick Douglass at 200, an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, celebrates his life, work, and, legacy through selected documents in the Gilder Lehrman Collection.

David Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History, and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, introduces the exhibition:

Born a slave in Talbot County on the eastern shore of Maryland in February 1818, Frederick Douglass was the son of Harriet Bailey, an enslaved woman. Named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, he took the surname Douglass from Walter Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake. Douglass hardly knew his mother, and never knew the true identity of his father, who in all likelihood was his mother’s white master. Hence, for life, he was an orphan in the fullest sense.

Douglass lived twenty years as a slave and nearly nine years as a fugitive slave subject to capture. From the 1840s to his death in 1895, he attained international fame as an abolitionist, reformer, editor, orator of almost unparalleled stature, and author of three classic autobiographies. As a public man, he began his abolitionist career two decades before America divided in a civil war over slavery. He lived to see black emancipation achieved in enormous bloodshed, to work actively for women’s equality, to experience the civil and political rights triumphs and tragedies of Reconstruction, and to witness America’s economic and international expansion in the Gilded Age. Douglass lived until the beginning of the age of Jim Crow, when America collapsed into retreat from the very victories and revolutions in race relations he had helped to win.

This epic life, a career of many transformations and personal reinventions, emerges from a single-page summary Douglass provided of his story in 1893, displayed in this exhibition. Above all, Douglass’s was a life forged in his mastery of words—the only real weapon he ever possessed. His genius with oratorical and written language is beautifully represented here. So many times he found the way to capture in words his nation’s predicament with race, as well as his own. In the last sentence of his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), his long-form masterpiece, Douglass wrote that he would carry on his fight for human freedom and equality “while Heaven lends me ability to use my voice, my pen, or my vote.” In the nineteenth century no other American left a greater mark with voice and pen on our common equal rights. It remains for us to preserve them.