Reading Notes Week 8 Part A

Reading Notes 

Week 8

Part A

• Frederick Douglass was the most important African American public figure during the nineteenth century. Even though Douglass was born into slavery and was subjected to manually labor instead of being on school. Douglass's perseverance allowed him to teach himself to read and use that to shortly become a powerful anti slavery speaker and writer. 
•  Full name Fredrick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in Talbot County in Maryland sometime in 1818. He barely knew his mom and his dad was most likely his slave master. At the age of six he had lived with his grandmother but soon went to live in his owners house. Douglass's owner at the time was one of the most wealthiest men in Maryland. 
• In this period of time Douglass recounts countless routine heartless consequences for the plantain slaves. For the better his life turned in 1826 Douglass was sent to live with a relative of his owner in Baltimore. There Hugh Auld's wife began to teach Douglass how to read and when Auld discovers his wife is teaching the slave boy how to read he becomes enraged with anger yelling that literacy would make Douglass unmanageable, not content, and would make him never be able to be a slave. 
• This knowledge changed Douglass's life find out that the key to freedom was through reading and obtaining knowledge he saw his clear pathway to being a free man. 
• Later he was send back tot he plantation where he got in to a long physical altercation with his master and freed himself by force. Although not lawfully free Douglass went back to live in Baltimore where he began to learn and work sending his wages back to his master. 
• In 1838 Douglass managed to escape and at first in his book he didn't list the strategy he used to escape slavery for good. Although after many years past he reveled that he dressed as a sailor and a free black slave gave Douglass his free papers to make it to New York where he married the women he previously met in Baltimore. He worked odd jobs and changed his name while helping the abolitionist movement.  
• Soon Douglass would begin to read an abolitionist newspaper and by chance met the editor who offered him a job and this became the start of greatness for Fredrick Douglass.