Frederick Douglass - His Own Words

HOW to Rise from Bondage

von Frederick Douglass

134 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

FREDERICK DOUGLASS - His Own WordsHOW to Rise From Bondage

He was born a slave and rose to advise Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.Frederick Douglass never knew his own birthday. He was raised by a grandmother he loved and then lost, on a Maryland plantation where the first thing he learned about the world was that a woman could be whipped until the blood flowed and nobody would stop it. He taught himself to read by trading bread with hungry white children for lessons, while the man who owned him said, out loud, that literacy would ruin a slave.At sixteen, he beat a professional "slave-breaker" in a bare-knuckle fight in a stable and was never touched again. At twenty, disguised as a sailor with a borrowed pass, he escaped slavery and rode a train north to become a fugitive and a free man. Within a few years he was one of the most electrifying speakers in America, a self-taught orator drawing crowds to hear a former slave explain, in language that still burns, exactly what four million of his countrymen were enduring.He was not content to be a symbol. He escaped the slave-catchers and built his own newspaper against the advice of many. He wrote his own story three times over four decades, each version more dangerous to tell than the last. He sent his own sons to fight in a war he'd spent a lifetime agitating for. He sat across a table from the president who signed the Emancipation Proclamation and told him, to his face, that his speech had been "a sacred effort". He forgave, in old age, the man who once legally owned him. He married a white woman decades his junior and answered the ensuing uproar with a single dry line that ended most arguments before they started. "This proves I am impartial"He stood at the foot of the Great Pyramid in Egypt and confirmed, with his own eyes, his argument that civilisation first arose in Africa. He watched the promise of Reconstruction curdle into lynchings and wrote, in his last years, some of the plainest, angriest prose of his life, trying to stop it. He never stopped working and died at the age of 77, the same day he'd spoken at a women's rights meeting.This is his story, told in his own words: the autobiographies, the letters, the courtroom oratory, even the one story he told as fiction. Frederick Douglass rose from bondage and lived a life, which he insisted would be narrated by no one but himself.

edited by Shumba

Part of the profit from this book will support clean water, sanitation and economic development work in Africa.

• Reihe: Shumba
• ISBN: 9781919139333
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 20.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published
• Herausgegeben von: Shumba