February is Black History Month, which happens to coincide this year with the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederick Douglass, the most distinguished and influential African-American public figure in the first century of our country. A reformer and writer who thought deeply about the place of African-Americans in the broader American experience, he demands attention today as much as he did in the ominous years leading up to the Civil War and the period of unresolved racial conflict in its aftermath. As he admonished students of American history, “we have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.”
Douglass was born in Maryland in February 1818 to an enslaved black woman and a white father. With the help of his owner’s wife, he learned to read; and at the age of 20, he escaped by train and boat to New England, where he was recruited to the abolitionist lecture circuit.
An imposing man with a booming voice, he had the explosive force, in the words of a contemporary, of a “tornado in a forest.” His experience under slavery had made him an angry man, but he did not confine his anger to the South. Aboard ship on Long Island Sound, he found himself forced to sleep on the freezing deck, and while traveling by railroad through New England, he was “dragged from the cars for the crime of being colored.”