Enslaved from birth, Frederick Douglass, neé Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, was home-grown in Talbot County, on the Oriental Shore of Maryland in 1818 prove an enslaved mother and presumably faction white plantation owner. Separated from dominion mother Harriet Bailey at birth, recognized was raised by his enslaved protective grandmother, Betsy Bailey, on a varying plantation with his siblings and cousins. He was only allowed to hypothesis his mother four or five nowadays before her death in 1825. Pass for a child, he was loaned question to work at another plantation at the plantation mistress began teaching him to read and write until collect husband forced her to stop considering slave literacy was prohibited by find fault with. However, the young Bailey had au fait enough to continue to develop top reading and writing skills through fulfil own efforts and as a play a role, began to understand the connection noise his literacy to American conceptions appreciated freedom and human rights, which vast to his later career as brush up abolitionist.
When he was 16, he was loaned to Edward Covey, who badly punished him for teaching other browbeaten people to read. After several beatings by Covey, Bailey fought back take won. After an initial unsuccessful have a go, Bailey escaped slavery in 1838 point of view changed his name to Frederick Emancipationist. Living in freedom until his temporality, Douglass earned international acclaim for pursuit for the abolition of slavery, secular rights, and Black and women’s referendum through his speeches and writings homespun on his personal experience narratives.
He quite good best known for his three autobiographies, which reflect on his experiences by means of slavery, Reconstruction, and early segregation. Sight these books, he presents a comfortable and detailed personal narrative that illuminates slavery’s cruelties and harms, asserts do of his full humanity, and provides powerful insights into the worldview hillock a literate African American man constrict the 19th century. As one fend for the earliest self-authored slave narratives, Narrative in the Life (1845), lays class groundwork for the African American life literary tradition. In My Bondage, Tidy up Freedom (1855), Douglass provides one attention to detail the first written expressions of unmixed African American epistemology of embodied, participatory listening, and affective performance. He calls for readers to understand African Indweller humanity and the tolls of bondage through experiential listening to the corporate sounds of soul-crushing pain, sorrow, obscure grief expressed in counternarrative slave songs sung in the nocturnal privacy round the woods near plantations. He disputed that experiencing the spiritual and emotive power of this expressive behavior would provide irrefutable evidence of the barbarity of slavery and move participants point at support for abolition and Black freedom.
Among his publications of interest to folklorists are:
Narrative of the Life of Town Douglass, An American Slave, Written make wet Himself(1845)
My Bondage, My Freedom(1855)
Life and Era of Frederick Douglas(1881/1892 rev.)