February 14: Happy Birthday, Frederick Douglass!

The birth dates for slaves were never recorded. Slaveholders took that away from black men and women to dehumanize them, and further, babies were often separated from their mothers within the first year to diminish any sense of “family.” So it was with Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. His grandmother, Betsey, a free woman, recollected that he was born in 1818 in a Maryland February.

Later in life, after he escaped to the North and became a freed man, Frederick changed his name to Douglass, and adopted February 14 as his birthday.

From such modest beginnings, and self-taught in reading and writing, Frederick Douglass led an inspiring life as a world-renowned orator and best-selling author, abolitionist and statesman and adviser to five U.S. Presidents. He was the first African-American to be appointed to a federal position by a sitting president; the first to be an editor – and publisher – of a national publication; first bank president, first ambassador to a foreign country and the first man of color to be invited to an inaugural ball, for Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration. He made his hometown, Rochester, N.Y., the first municipality in the country with non-segregated schools. He worked tirelessly for the conscription of black soldiers into the Union Army which helped change the tide of the Civil War, and later toiled vociferously for the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, providing all citizens the right to vote regardless of race, creed or color. Douglass earned the first press credentials awarded to an African-American for the U.S. Senate Gallery, and upon his death in 1895, he was the first African-American to lie in state at the Capitol rotunda.

A most distinguished statesman, he was remembered by Theodore Tilton with this sonnet:

I knew the noblest giants of my day,
And he was of them–strong amid the strong:
But gentle too: for though he suffered wrong,
Yet the wrong-doer never heard him say, ‘Thee also do I hate.’ …

A lover’s lay– No dirge–no doleful requiem song–
Is what I owe him; for I loved him long;
As dearly as a younger brother may.
Proud is the happy grief with which I sing;
For, O my Country! in the paths of men
There never walked a grander man than he!
He was a peer of princes–yea, a king!
Crowned in the shambles and the prison-pen!
The noblest Slave that ever God set free!

– Theodore Tilton, Sonnets to the Memory of Frederick Douglass

For more information about the award-winning screenplay about Frederick Douglass’ fascinating rise from bondage to the forefront of the fight for American Civil Liberties, visit http://www.gleasonpr.com/nsfd/

Happy 195^th Birthday, Frederick Douglass !