My Bondage and My Freedom: (excerpts – Frederick Douglass)
My Bondage & My Freedom is a masterful recounting of Frederick Douglass’ remarkable life. It is a fiery condemnation of a system that reduced people to property and kept an entire race in chains. Finally, it explains how his struggles for independence didn’t end when he reached the so-called “free states” of the North.
- About the author: Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York. He quickly became famous for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. Accordingly, abolitionists in his time described him as a living counterexample to slaveholders’ arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens.