For someone who was not educated in rhetoric, Frederick Douglas became one of the more prominent anti-slavery speakers of his day. These excerpts of his biographical speeches are amazingly telling of the life of an American slave during the years leading up to the civil war. They chronicle the birth of education for Douglas and how the desire to learn more and more opened up to him a whole new perspective on who he really was in his own eyes as well as the eyes of the world in which he lived. The more knowledge that Douglas gained the more he understood the travesty of a human being the property of another, whether well treated or not. His desire to learn caused him to put his life on the line and secretly continue teaching himself to read and write through very ingenious ways. After running away from his master, Douglas met up with a group of Abolitionists and was asked to speak at an abolitionist's convention where, though stumbled through the speech, it "opened upon me a new life-a life for which I had no preparation. I was a graduate from the peculiar institution.with my diploma on my back" (pg. 1076). From this point on Douglas dedicated his life to the emancipation and the elevation of his enslaved class (pg. 1084).
This text reminded me of the selections in our text by Maria Stewart that were discussed briefly in an oral report. Stewart was also an African American, but was born to free African American parents. The similarities I find in their writings stem from the fact that they both put great stock in the idea that the education of the African American as the method to real freedom from prejudice in this country. She states on page 1037 of her Lecture delivered at the Franklin Hall that, "Methinks that were the American free people of color to turn their attention more assiduously to moral worth and intellectual improvement, this would be the result: prejudice would gradually diminish, and the whites would be compelled to say, unloose those fetters.
