Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois

Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois

Frederick Augustus Bailey, commonly known as Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland. His mother Harriet Bailey was a slave and Frederick also became a slave as by law, children followed the status of their mothers. He was separated from his mother at an early age and was raised with a group of slave children. At the age of eight, he was sent to the custody of Hugh and Sophia Auld. Here he was taught Bible by Sophia Auld despite of the fact that slaves were barred from receiving education. To quench his thirst for learning, he bought his first book, The Columbian Orator, at the age of thirteen. This book made him understand the miseries of enslaved people and realized the necessity of universal freedom. This knowledge sowed a seed of revolt in Douglass, which ultimately made him escape the slave camp in 1938. After his arrival in New York he changed his name to Frederick Douglass.

There he started working for abolitionist movement and joined American Anti-Slavery Society and came to be known as a famous orator, journalist, and antislavery leader of the 19th century. He published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in 1845, and later on two others, My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855 and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass in 1881 respectively.

Douglass was a great advocate of women's equality and believed in the right of slaves to rebel and the right of fugitives to resist re-enslavement. According to him the oppression was not only physical but intellectual as well. The slaves at that time faced lack of physical freedom plus intellectual imprisonment. The masters opposed literacy for slaves for the fear that it would create awareness of their rights among them.

Douglass realized that slaves were intentionally kept illiterate and ignorant so that they could not recognize their fundamental and civil rights. Their personalities were suppressed and were made thoughtless and visionless. Their brains were tamed in a way that they could not think beyond whatever they were told by their masters. Douglass narrated his own experiences as a slave and explained the plight of the class of people who have been deprived of their right to be a human being.

'I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. ...he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man'.

By making themselves mindless, it was possible for people to live with a little comfort while being slaves. Literate slaves were expected to be more difficult to handle or suppress and posed greater resistance. Slave education in the 19th century America was prohibited by law and those guilty of violation were subject to ...