Frederick Douglass Tea Towel

What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. How does a slave bear on a plantation in deeply racist 19thcentury America go on to be nominated for vice-president of the United States? Just ask Frederick Douglass. Douglass led an extraordinary life, all the way through. Despite laws forbidding it, he was taught the alphabet as a child, the knowledge he passed onto other slaves as a teenager. Aged 20, he escaped slavery, fleeing to the North, where he fiercely campaigned for the rights of African-Americans, women, and Native Americans, eventually becoming a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York. With 160 separate portraits taken of him, Douglass became the 19thcentury& most photographed American, a platform which he called; democratic art that could finally represent black people as humans. He also became a well-known orator and was invited to speak at a 4thof July celebration in 1852 in New York.