FREDERICK
AUGUSTUS
WASHINGTON
BAILEY
changed his name to Frederick Douglass after he escaped slavery in 1838.
He stayed with a white family named Bailey in New Bedford, Massachusetts
and did not want to cause them difficulty by having the same name. He was
born in Talbot County, Maryland and went to Baltimore, where he taught
at the Fortie school in the early 1830's. He later became closely aligned
with abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown and was
such an eloquent speaker that his opponents doubted whether he had really
been born a slave. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
is considered a literary masterpiece. He died in Washington, D.C. in 1895.
Source: Summarized from Microsoft
Encarta.
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