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 Britain 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, Chinese migrants and Native Americans.
More information, sources and maps in our Frederick Douglass timeline on our Stories web app: https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/tag/7930/frederick-douglass https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/2214424608742677/?type=3