Born: February 1818, Talbot County, MD

Education: Self-educated

Died: February 20, 1895, Washington, DC

When historian Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week in February 1926, he chose the month of President Abraham Lincoln and Douglass's birthdays. Both men were crucial in the nation's “new birth of freedom.” When the Civil War broke out, Douglass canceled a trip to Haiti and vowed to help recruit “a liberating army.”

He was a strong enemy of race slavery and injustice. Born a slave, at age seven his owner took him to Baltimore, where luckily he attained literacy, observed free blacks moving about, and determined to be autonomous. He escaped in 1838 and, through an 1841 speech to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, began his pivotal career. In 1845 he published the first of three autobiographies, selling 5,000 copies within four months and 30,000 by 1850. Publisher of the North Star, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Douglass’ Monthly, he championed abolitionism, women's rights, and social justice. Active in the Underground Railroad, he aided more than 400 runaway slaves at his Rochester, New York home ca. 1847–57. The war helped achieve black emancipation and freedom, but persistent racism stymied blacks’ aspirations and efforts toward equal citizenship. Douglass struggled for racial equality until his death.