Resources about Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass and the Douglass Family in Washington, DC

Frederick Douglass was born in Talbot County, Maryland in 1818. As an enslaved person, he never knew his birthday but chose Valentine’s Day to honor his mother, who he said called him her “Little Valentine.” He escaped slavery at the age of 20 with the help of his soon-to-be wife Anna Murray, a free Black woman from Baltimore. The couple lived and raised their five children in Massachusetts and in Rochester, New York, where Douglass published The North Star newspaper and the family ran a stop on the Underground Railroad. In 1872, when Douglass was 54 years old, he and Anna returned home to DC and joined their three sons in the city, living first on A Street NE on Capitol Hill before purchasing land and building a home they called “Cedar Hill” in Anacostia, now the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site run by the National Park Service. 

During his time in DC, Frederick Douglass was appointed the first Black U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia and the first DC Recorder of Deeds and also served as President of the Freedman’s Bank and as a longtime trustee of Howard University. Douglass was an advisor to several US presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, and delivered the keynote speech dedicating the Emancipation/Freedman’s Memorial in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill in 1876. Douglass also continued writing, publishing and fighting fearlessly for voting rights, women’s rights, and for the worldwide abolition of slavery. In recent years, DC has celebrated Douglass’s accomplishments by unveiling a statue of Douglass in the US Capitol Building (dedicated in 2018 by then-Vice President Joseph Biden to celebrate the bicentennial of Douglass’s birth) and by rededicating the new Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge over the Anacostia River in 2021. Douglass’s work created the foundation for the US civil rights movement, and Black History Month was established in February to include the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Douglass died at Cedar Hill in 1895 at the age of 77.

For more information, please visit the National Park Service's Frederick Douglass National Historic Site webpage, HERE.

The Maryland Frederick Douglass Driving Tour

The state of Maryland is an important part of the Douglass story. Both Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass were born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland (Frederick near Easton, Talbot County, and Anna in Denton, Caroline County). The couple met in Baltimore.

You can explore these and many other sites via the Maryland Office of Tourism's Maryland Frederick Douglass Driving Tour. A link to the Driving Tour, including a downloadable pdf file of the map for printing, is HERE.


Our thanks to the Maryland Department of Commerce, Office of Tourism for permission to post the link.

Websites:

  1. The Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives website

  2. The Frederick Douglass Ireland Project

  3. Dr Hannah-Rose Murray’s research on mapping Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists who traveled to Ireland and the UK:

    1. Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland

    2. African-American Digital Mapping Project

    3. Map of other abolitionists traveling in the UK and Ireland

  4. Frederick Douglass National Historic Site

  5. Frederick Douglass National Historic Site - Virtual Tour and Google Virtual tour

  6. National Park Service - Douglass info page

  7. Douglass Tour Virtual Maps

  8. Douglass National Historic Site

  9. American Prophet Musical about Frederick Douglass

  10. The 1619 Project website

  11. Solas Nua project about Frederick Douglass

  12. Virtual Douglass exhibit

  13. Irish Embassy Washington: Overview of Frederick Douglass Commemorations in 2020-2021

  14. History of Black History Month in the U.K and the U.S

This recent episode of RTÉ Nationwide is an excellent introduction to Douglass’s visit to Ireland; it features Prof Lee Jenkins and Dr Dónal Hassett as well as Dr Ebun Joseph, Ireland’s first lecturer in Black Studies, discussing Douglass’s life and legacy. 

Other digital projects:

Videos

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Research

Frederick Douglass in Ireland: The Black O’Connell

Written by Dr Laurence Fenton in 2014, this book takes a closer look at Douglass’s two-year lecture tour of Britain and Ireland. Fenton sheds light on Douglass’s transformation as an orator, activist and author after he left the US after the publication of his first autobiography. The book explores Douglass four months in Ireland including his meeting with 'The Liberator' Daniel O'Connell and Fr. Theobald Mathew.

Black OConnell.jpg

“Beyond the Pale: Green and Black and Cork”

In her 2009 article, Prof Lee Jenkins examines the impact of Douglass’s visits to Ireland, and, more specifically, to Cork. She looks at his work and speeches as an antislavery activist and abolitionist and lays out how “Douglass found his freedom through Ireland on a literal as well as a metaphorical level” (91).

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Other books and resources

A list kindly combined by the organizers of the “Black History Making Event in Britain and the United States”

  • Hannah-Rose Murray, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles (Cambridge, 2020)

  • Hannah-Rose Murray, Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland 1845-1895 (Edinburgh, 2021)

  • Richard Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall (1983)

  • Manisha Sinha, The Slave's Cause (2016)

  • Barbara McCaskill, Love, Liberation and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory (2016)

  • Peter Ripley, The Black Abolitionist Papers: Volume 1: The British Isles (1985)

  • Clare Taylor, An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (1974)

  • Marcus Rediker, The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist. London: Verso, 2017.

  • Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. 

  • Anne-Marie Angelo, Black Power on the Move: Migration, Internationalism, and the British and Israeli Black Panthers (UNC Press, December 2020)

  • Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

  • Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2011).

  • Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press).

  • S. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

  • ONico Slate ed, Black Power Beyond Borders: The Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

  • HollyGale Millette. “Exchanging Fugitive Identity: William and Ellen Craft’s Transatlantic Reinvention (1850–69).” In Imagining Transatlantic Slavery , edited by Cora Kaplan, and John Oldfield , 61–76. Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 

  • Bridget Bennett, "Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Transatlantic Echoes of "The Color Line" in Transatlantic Exchanges From the Anglo-American War to the Emancipation Proclamation eds. Kevin Hutchings and Julia Wright (Leicester: Ashgate 2011), 101-113. 

  • Kennetta Hammond Perry, “History Beyond Borders: Teaching Black Britain and Reimaging Black Liberation” pp 107- 124 in Hakim Adi (ed), Black British History: New Perspectives (Zed, 2019).

  • Hazel Carby, H. (2009). Lost (and Found?) in Translation. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 13(1), pp 27-40.

  • Joseph Yannielli and Christine Whyte “Shackles and Handcuffs: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Racist Policing,” History Workshop Journal, 9 July 2020.

  • Hannah-Rose Murray "I Shall Speak Out Against This and Other Evils": African American Activism in the British Isles 1865-1903  https://edinburgh.academia.edu/HannahRoseMurray.

  • J. N., Brown, ‘Black Liverpool, Black America and the Gendering of Diasporic Space’, Cultural Anthropology, 13, 3 (August, 1998): 291– 395.

  • Marc Matera, ‘Colonial Subjects: Black Intellectuals and the Development of Colonial Studies in Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 49 (April, 2010): 388– 418.