Frederick Douglasss Speeches essays

Frederick Douglass's Speeches essays Frederick Douglass tried to evoke a desire for Liberation amongst the African-American people in his writings and oratory. To many people, Douglass appeared to be the black Moses, leading his people to freedom not only physically, but mentally and getting there by non-violent means. Douglass believed that if he could successfully show that blacks were in fact equal to whites, he thought that in turn everyone would recognize this and put an end to slavery. Frederick Douglass has emerged as the representative black male writer of his time period. As is well known, Douglass, the son of a slave woman and a white slave master, spent the first part of his life as a slave in Maryland, escaping to New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1838 (Levine 3).Fearing fugitive slave hunters, Douglass sailed to the British Isles, and when he returned in 1847, he established the North Star, thus beginning a sixteen-year career as an editor and publisher of three different antislavery newspapers. In the middle of this journalistic career, he printed an expanded version of his autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), a text that articulated some of the key tenets of his newspapers temperance and the importance of pursuing black elevation in the United States. As a slave himself, Douglass in his person embodies the possibilities of regeneration. In My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass signals his entry into revolutionary tradition. And thus he presents himself in his autobiography as a national representative, fighting not only for its moral and political principles but for the very civilization that served as a foundation for the development of those principles. In this work, Douglass implying that blacks, by following Douglasss representative example, can overcome what Douglass refers to as the ten thousand discouragements ... which best their existence, in this country (Holland 58) he nonetheless ...