workingclasshistory:

On this day, 20 February 1895, Black abolitionist and advocate for women’s rights who escaped slavery, Frederick Douglass, died in Washington DC aged 77. Douglass wrote his first autobiography in 1845, in which he named his former enslaver, and so he headed to the UK and Ireland, in part to avoid his former enslaver trying to reclaim his “property”. There he spent two years raising the international profile of the movement to abolish slavery. He then returned to the US and set up a newspaper, The North Star, and after the civil war fought for the rights of the poor, women, Black people, Native Americans and Asian migrant workers.
On the latter, during a wave of anti-Asian racism sweeping the US, Douglass argued to people of European descent that they did not did not exclusively own the country: “It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here.” The right to migrate, he said, is the “great right that I assert for the Chinese and Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go to the side of humanity.” https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1656315751220235/?type=3