Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass (February 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer and statesman. Son of a slave woman and an unknown white man, "Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey" was born on Maryland's eastern shore. At the age of eight he was sent to Baltimore to live with a ship carpenter named Hugh Auld where he learned to read and first learned about abolition and abolitionists. "Going to live at Baltimore," Douglass would later say, "laid the foundation, and opened the gateway, to all my subsequent prosperity." After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, becoming famous for his oratory and antislavery writings. He was described by abolitionists in his time as a living counterexample to enslavers' arguments that enslaved people lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. At this time, Northerners found it difficult to believe that such a great orator had once been enslaved. In 1845, in response to this disbelief, Douglass published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
Portrait Bust / Work in Progress
Size: Over life size
Media: Clay, to be cast in bronze
Location: Work in progress