Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Name
Professor
Frederick Douglass
Date
Frederick Douglass: An American Slave
Fredrick Douglass embodies the struggles that slaves went through during the days before the emancipation proclamation. Defying all the odds to get valuable education, Frederick Douglass fought to ensure that the institution of slavery was comprehensively abolished. Slavery was a common and normal practice in America. The Europeans believed that black people were inferior, and so they enslaved them, made them work on farms and industries, whipped them and denied them fundamental rights. Even though the blacks did not take this practice well, they had no avenue for complaints and so they lived through the rough conditions every passing day. As time passed, anti-slavery groups sprung and spread the message across America. Frederick Douglass was one of the most polarizing figures in the early days of slavery. His was a story of struggle against racial prejudice, something that defined his identity and played a central role in most of his works. Frederick Douglass loathed slavery due to its cruel, inhuman and terrible treatment of people. Through his narrative, he highlights how the masters in the south got influenced by the labor system to be crueler. It is such things that Frederick Douglass essentially fought against, both literally and through literary works.
Frederick Douglass was an African-American slave who in his book says he does not know the date of his birth. He has very few memories of his mother who died when he was seven years old. Slave children were commonly separated from their parents at an early age, so all he remembers are the night visits from his mother. He grew up as a slave, and he explains the cruelty of the slave masters and the fear of slaves. He moved to Baltimore, a move he says was life changing since he believes that if he had not moved he could have remained a slave forever. Frederick learns how to read and write from his master's wife, but the learning process is cut short by the master who says slaves are not supposed to know how to read nor write because this will make it difficult to enslave them. That makes Frederick work even harder to improve his reading and writing.
Douglass will, later on, escape to the North where he attends the abolitionist convention. He eventually becomes an orator, journalist, human rights and women rights activist, author, publisher, social reformer and an abolitionist. ...