Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches

I have no love for America.

As such, I have no patriotism. I have no country.

What country have I?

The institutions of this country do not know me,

do not recognize me as a man.

I am not thought of or spoken of

except as a piece of property.

Now,

in such a country as this, I cannot have...

patriotism.

Imagine that you had to dispel doubts

about your full humanity

every time you took to a stage.

Imagine you had to refute doubts

about your own native ability

every time you picked up a pen.

Imagine having to fight to show

that you were as complicated a human being

as any who walked the face of the earth,

having to fight that battle

over and over every day.

That was the life of Frederick Douglass.

He was the most famous Black man

in the world in the 19th century,

and he achieved that position

through one means... His voice.

More than 20 years of my life

were consumed in a state of slavery.

I grew up to manhood eating the bread

and drinking the cup of slavery with the most degraded

of my brother bondmen, and sharing with them

all the painful conditions of their wretched lot.

In consideration of these facts,

I feel that I have a right to speak

and to speak strongly.

Yet, my friends...

I feel bound to speak truly.

The power of Douglass' words,

the way that he wielded language, was undeniable,

and is still undeniable.

He could take you, in a single sentence sometimes,

inside of a crisis

and say, "Here's what it's doing to us."

"Here's what it's doing to you.

Here's what it's doing to the nation."

There can be no peace to the wicked

while slavery continues in the land.

It will be condemned,

and there will be agitation.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: He was able to realize from his own experience

that an arbitrary system had been created,

designed to reinforce

the sense of inferiority

of every Black person.

A system that was designed to make them believe

that nature had made them inferior to white people.

And his job was to blow up that system.

The very first mental effort

that I now remember on my part

was an attempt to solve the mystery,

why am I a slave?

Why are some people slaves and others masters?

I could not have been more than 7 or 8 years old

when I began to make this subject my study.

It's a childhood where he has to learn to survive.

He has to learn to overcome his own fear.

He has to see brutality, but live past it.

From my earliest recollection, I entertained a deep conviction

that slavery would not always be able to hold me

within its foul embrace.

The desire for freedom only needed a favorable breeze

to fan it into a blaze at any moment.

Kenneth B. Morris, Jr.: There was one point in his life

that he described

as divine providence in his favor,

and that was he was chosen

from among all of the children on the plantation

on the Eastern shore of Maryland to go to Baltimore

to be the house servant for his master's family.

I left that plantation with inexpressible joy.

Going to live at Baltimore opened the gateway

to all my subsequent prosperity.

Baltimore made it possible for Douglass

to dream and imagine.

He sees the world come into the harbor of Baltimore,

this maritime capital,

and he can begin to imagine that there's a world outside.

Morris, Jr.: But what happened, most importantly,

when he got there, his slave mistress

didn't know that it was illegal to teach him.

She was just a kind, Christian lady with this heart,

and there was Fred, you know,

bright and eager and ready to learn,

and so, she naturally began to teach him his ABCs.

He's in search of any kind of

adult loving figure he can find.

He finds one in Sophia Auld.

She taught him his alphabet, read out loud with him,

got him interested in language.

But alas, this kind heart

had but such a short time to remain such.

Mr. Auld found out what was going on,

and at once forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further,

telling her that it was unlawful

as well as unsafe to teach a slave to read.

He would at once become unmanageable

and of no value to his master.

These words sank deep into my heart

and called into existence

an entirely new train of thought.

From that moment,

I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

And he would teach himself to read and write.

He was very clever in the way that he went about doing that.

He would carry bread in his pocket,

and he would trade the bread for reading lessons

with the poor kids.

He picks up scraps of the King James version of the Bible

from gutters. He dries them out,

and he sets them out nicely so he can learn from them.

He was reading all the time, and the fact that

he never had one day of formal education

is just flabbergasting.

He tells us that he first sees

the word "abolition" in a newspaper,

and then, again in a magazine.

We can only imagine our way into

a young boy's mind.

He's trapped in this world of enslavement,

and now he learns that up North,

they're organizing to end slavery.

That's got to be an amazing source of hope,

and by the time he's 18, he's scheming to escape.

On Monday,

the third day of September 1838,

I bade farewell to the city of Baltimore

and to that slavery

which had been my abhorrence from childhood.

This is one of the most unusual escape stories

in all of the literature about slavery.

There are no bloodhounds

and no, uh, nights hiding in the swamps.

Essentially, Douglass goes to the Baltimore train station

and jumps on a train.

I was well on the way to Havre de Grace

before the conductor came into the Negro car

to collect tickets

and examine the papers of his Black passengers.

This was a critical moment in the drama.

Had the conductor looked closely at the paper,

he could not have failed to discover that it called

for a very different looking person from myself.

The train was moving at a very high rate of speed

for that time of railroad travel,

but to my anxious mind,

it was moving far too slowly.

Minutes were hours

and hours were days.

He takes that train,

two other trains,

and three steamboats later,

in about 38 hours,

he arrived into lower Manhattan at the base of Chambers Street.

I found myself in the big city of New York,

a free man.

The bonds that had held me to old master were broken.

No man now had a right to call me his slave

or assert mastery over me.

Such is briefly the manner of my escape from slavery

and the end of my experience as a slave.

In the summer of 1841,

a grand anti-slavery convention

was held in Nantucket under the auspices

of William Lloyd Garrison and his friends.

William Lloyd Garrison was

the most important abolitionist in America

at the time Douglass met him.

He led a moral suasionist campaign

to destroy slavery.

I attended this convention never supposing

I would take part in the proceedings.

I was not aware that anyone connected with the convention

even so much as knew my name.

I was, however, quite mistaken.

He says he didn't intend on speaking at the convention.

He was just there to listen.

But once asked to speak, he got up and simply told

his personal story from his slave youth.

I feel greatly embarrassed

when I attempt to address an audience of white people.

I'm not used to speaking to them.

And it makes me tremble when doing so

because I have always looked up to them with fear.

My friends, I've come to tell you something about slavery.

What I know of it...

as I felt it.

When I came North,

I was astonished to find that the abolitionists,

they knew so much about it.

They were acquainted with its deadly effects