Frederick Douglass
Taught himself to read in secret, escaped slavery at 20, and became the most famous Black man in America
Frederick Bailey was born on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland, around 1818. He never knew his father, who was white, and saw his mother only a handful of times before she died. Sent to Baltimore as a boy, he was taught the alphabet by his owner's wife until her husband stopped it, explaining that reading would spoil a slave. Douglass took that as the best argument for learning he had ever heard, and paid poor white boys with bread to teach him.
At 16 he was hired out to Edward Covey, a farmer known for breaking difficult slaves, who whipped him weekly for months. One day Douglass fought back for two hours, and Covey never touched him again. In 1838, with papers borrowed from a free Black sailor and money from Anna Murray, a free woman he later married, he took a train north and reached New York.
Three years later he spoke at an abolitionist meeting in Nantucket, and William Lloyd Garrison hired him as a lecturer. His 1845 autobiography was so eloquent that some readers refused to believe a former slave had written it, and because it named names he left for Britain and Ireland for two years, while friends there raised the money to buy his legal freedom. He returned to found his own newspaper, the North Star, in Rochester.
He attended the Seneca Falls women's rights convention in 1848, recruited Black soldiers during the Civil War and argued with Lincoln to his face. He died in 1895, hours after attending a women's rights meeting.