Learn to read, speak out, resist: freedom is won, not granted.
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
These records present three works: the 1845 Narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom of 1855 and the Fourth of July oration of 1852. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, the novella The Heroic Slave, the newspapers he edited, his many other speeches and his correspondence are not indexed here; this is a selection, not a complete bibliography.
011845
Published in Boston in 1845 by the Anti-Slavery Office, with a preface by William Lloyd Garrison and a letter from Wendell Phillips, the book also answered audiences who doubted that so eloquent a speaker had ever been a slave. Naming real people and places exposed him to recapture, so he withheld how he had escaped.
021852
Delivered on Monday 5 July 1852 at Corinthian Hall in Rochester before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, the day after a holiday that fell on a Sunday that year, the speech was printed as a pamphlet, and an extract appeared in the appendix of My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855. It follows the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 and Douglass’s break with the Garrisonians in 1851.
031855
Published in New York in 1855 with an introduction by the Black physician and writer James McCune Smith and a dedication to Gerrit Smith, the book appeared after Douglass had broken with Garrison over the Constitution and political action. An introduction by a Black intellectual replaced the white sponsorship of 1845; Ottilie Assing published a German translation in 1860.