'This is not a lesson in forgiveness.' Why Frederick Douglass met with his former enslaver.
A firm believer in the equality of all people, the great orator practiced what he preached.
The year 2020 will be remembered as a perfect storm of traumas. A global pandemic crashed on every shore. Politics rattled America. And a long-overdue racial reckoning began.
In the midst of this tumult, one name has emerged again and again—a man, it seems, destined to inform both his time and ours. Frederick Douglass once faced a reckoning of his own, and his words and deeds still teach us today.
Before becoming one of America's great abolitionists, writers, orators, and icons, Frederick Douglass spent the first 20 years of his life in bondage. Born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, in February 1818, he was enslaved by multiple people during his first two decades. But none
