About Me
THE ROCHESTER YEARS:Douglass bought a two story home in Rochester, New York for Anna and the children and on December 3, 1847, Douglass began his second career, when his four page weekly newspaper, the North Star, came off the presses. On the masthead appeared the motto, "Right is of no sex - Truth is of no color - God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren." Once the North Star began to circulate, Douglass's friends in the abolitionist movement rallied to join in praising it. However, not everyone was pleased to see another antislavery paper - especially one edited by an ex-slave. Some local citizens were unhappy that their town was the site of a black newspaper, and the New York Herald urged the citizens of Rochester to dump Douglass's printing press into Lake Ontario. Gradually, Rochester came to take pride in the North Star and its bold editor.The town had a reputation for being pro-abolitionist. Rochester's women were active in antislavery societies, and through them Douglass kept in close contact with the leaders in the fight for women's rights, among them Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Along with the good will of Rochester's abolitionist and female political activists, Douglass received encouragement from the local printer's union. The North Star received a number of glowing reviews, but unfortunately the praises did not translate into financial success. The cost of producing a weekly newspaper was high and subscriptions grew slowly. For a number of years, Douglass was forced to depend on his own savings and contributions from friends to keep the paper afloat. He was forced to return to the lecture circuit to raise money for the paper. During the paper's first year, he was on the road for six months. In the spring of 1848, he had to mortgage his home.In the midst of these troubles, a friend from England arrived to help Douglass with his financial problems. Julia Griffiths had raised enough money to help launch the paper, and now she was prepared to fight for its survival. Griffiths put the North Star's finances in order, and Douglass was eventually able to regain possession of his home. By 1851, he would be able to write to his friend, the abolitionist publisher and politician Gerrit Smith, "The North Star sustains itself, and partly sustains my large family. It has reached a living point. Hitherto, the struggle of its life has been to live. Now it more than lives." Despite the ups and downs, Douglass's newspaper continued publication as a weekly until 1860 and survived for three more years as a monthly. After 1851, it would be titled Frederick Douglass' Paper. Douglass's newspaper symbolized the potential for blacks to achieve whatever goals they set. The paper provided a forum for black writers and highlighted the success achieved by prominent black figures in American society.For Douglass, starting the North Star marked the end of his dependence on Garrison and other white abolitionists. The paper allowed him to discover the problems facing blacks around the country. Douglass had heated arguments with many of his fellow black activists, but these debates showed that his people were beginning to involve themselves in the center of events affecting their position in America. By the end of the 1840's, Douglass was well on his way to becoming the most famous and respected black leader in the country. He was in great demand as a speaker and writer, he had proved himself to be and independent thinker and courageous spokesman for black liberty and equality.During his years in Rochester, Douglass continued to grow in status as the editor of the nation's best known black newspaper, in which he was free to attack slavery with all the power of his intellect. Yet the turmoil of the 1850's would severely test his faith in the ability of America to rid itself of the institution that kept his people in bondage. Some of the turmoil made its way into Douglass's home. While he roamed far beyond his original bounds, his wife, though hard-working, remained uneducated and politically unambitious. Douglass hired a teacher for Anna in 1848, hoping to bridge the gap between them. But his effort failed and Anna remained almost totally illiterate.Douglass appreciated his wife's domestic skills, but he also admired the educated, politically active women who served in the antislavery and women's rights movements. He was grateful for all the help the women abolitionists had given blacks, and in 1848, he showed his support for the feminist cause by attending the first women's rights convention. The movement drew much hostile press, and the 35 women and 32 men who went to the convention were described as "manhaters" and "hermaphrodites" (people with both male and female sexual features). The women delegates hesitated to make the demand for voting rights (suffrage) a part of their movement's platform, and the feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked Douglass to speak on the matter. With an appeal for bold action, Douglass convinced the women that political equality was an essential step in their liberation.The cause of women's rights continued to remain important to Douglass. Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott among many other feminists would be his lifelong friends. A scandal erupted in 1848 when Julia Griffiths began to serve as Douglass's office and business manager and soon became his almost constant companion. She arranged his lectures, dealt with the paper's finances and accompanied him to meetings. People in Rochester gradually adjusted to the sight of the black leader and the white woman walking arm in arm down the street. Rumors began to fly because Griffiths lived in the same house with Douglass and his wife. Anna Douglas was uneasy about the local talk, but did not speak much about the situation. The controversy was reported in the newspapers, and Douglass was attacked by the Garrisonians for involving the abolitionist movement in a scandal. In 1852, Griffiths decided to spare Douglass further embarrassment by moving out of his home. She remained his close associate until 1855, when she returned to England.Tensions between Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison began to mount because Douglass's views on how to fight slavery gradually began to change and differed sharply from Garrison's. The first principles of Garrison that Douglass began to question was the idea that resisting slavery through violent means was wrong. In 1847, Douglass met with the militant white abolitionist John Brown, who helped to convince Douglass that pacifist means could not by themselves bring an end to slavery. Brown had told him that slaveholders "had forfeited their right to live, and that slaves had the right to gain their liberty in any way they could." At abolitionist meetings Douglass began telling his audiences that he would be pleased to hear that the slaves in the South had revolted and "were spreading death and destruction." Ten years later, he had completely abandoned the idea that slavery could be ended peacefully. Douglass began widening his circle of abolitionist friends and thus began to question Garrison's opposition to seeking antislavery reforms through the political process.In 1848, he urged women to fight for the vote. Garrison's view of the Constitution as a proslavery document was not accepted by all abolitionists, as Douglass began to talk with these dissenters, he began to see the matter in a different way. The Constitution, with its emphasis on promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty for all, clearly seemed to be antislavery. The North, Douglass realized, would never abolish slavery if that could only be done by dividing the Union and dismantling the Constitution. He therefore decided that slavery would have to be ended through political reforms. Garrit Smith, who was a leader in the antislavery Liberty party became associated with Douglass and got him involved in politics. In 1848, he attended a convention of the Free Soil party, which was trying to stop the spread of slavery into areas west of the Mississippi River.The final split between Douglass and Garrison took place in June, 1851 at the annual meeting of the American Antislavery Society. Douglass shocked his old associates by publicly announcing that he intended to urge the readers of the North Star to engage in politics. The Garrisonian press launched a vicious assault against him during the following months. The disputes between the antislavery factions did not dominate Douglass's life. He was active in any cause that furthered the cause of his people. Douglass also tried to establish a black vocational school, an institution that would train its students to become skilled tradesmen. Among the people he visited in his efforts to raise funds for the school was Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the immensely popular antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin . Unfortunately, Douglass was unable to raise enough money to start the school.Douglass was a proud and loving father although he was often away from home. A fifth child, Annie, was born in 1849. Rochester's public schools would not admit black students so Douglass enrolled his oldest child, Rosetta, into a private school. However, even there Rosetta was segregated from white students, and Douglass finally hired a woman to teach his children at home. Never one to let racial discrimination go unchallenged, Douglass campaigned to end segregation in Rochester's school system, and in 1857 his efforts succeeded.In 1850 Douglass became strongly involved in the underground railroad, the system set up by antislavery groups to bring runaways to sanctuaries in the North and in Canada. Douglass's home in Rochester was near the Canadian border, and during the 1850s it became an important station on the underground railroad. Eventually, he became the superintendent of the entire system in his area. He often found runaways sitting on the steps of his newspaper office when he arrived for work. At times, as many as 11 fugitives were hiding in his home. Over the years, he and Anna fed and sheltered hundreds of these men and women. Only a few of the slaves who tried to escape from the South were successful. Douglass fiercely attacked the fugitive slave laws and the many atrocities that were being committed against runaway slaves.In a speech given in Rochester on Independence Day in 1852, Douglass pointed out how differently blacks and whites viewed the day's celebrations: What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all the other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim...To him your celebration is a sham...a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States. The sufferings of the hunted fugitive slaves reminded Douglass that freedom for his people would not come easily. In a speech he made at a Canandaigua, New York, convention celebrating the 20th anniversary of the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies, Douglass preached that blacks must unite to gain their liberty and that they must be prepared for a hard struggle. Blacks, he said, would have to pay a heavy price to win their freedom. "We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others."During the mid-1850s, John Brown was the leader of one of the Free Soil bands fighting the proslavery forces in Kansas. But Brown wanted to start a slave revolt in the South. In 1859, he decided to lead an attack on the northern Virginia town of Harpers Ferry, seize the weapons stored in the nearby federal armory, and hold the local citizens hostage while he rounded up slaves in the area. Gathering a small force of white and black volunteers, Brown rented a farm near Harpers Ferry and made his preparations for attack. From the farm, Brown wrote to Douglass, asking him to come to a meeting in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in August. There Brown announced his plans and urged Douglass to join in the attack. Douglass refused. He had agreed with Brown's earlier ideas, but he knew that an attack on federal property would enrage most Americans.This was the last time Douglass and Brown met. On October 16, 1589, Brown and his men seized Harpers Ferry. The next night, federal troops led by Colonel Robert E. Lee marched into the town and stormed the armory where Brown's band was stationed. Brown was captured, and two of his sons were killed in the fighting. In less than two months, Brown was tried for treason, found guilty, and hanged. Douglass was lecturing in Philadelphia when he received the news about Brown's raid, and he was warned that letters had been found that implicated him in the attack. The headlines for the newspapers' accounts of the incident featured his name prominently. Knowing that he stood little chance of a fair trial if he were captured and sent to Virginia, Douglass fled to Canada. While in Canada, Douglass wrote letters in his own defense, justifying both his flight and his refusal to help Brown. One of the men captured during the raid said that Douglass had promised to appear at Harpers Ferry with reinforcements. Douglass denied this accusation, saying that he would never approve of attacks on federal property. But though he could not condone the raid, he praised Brown as a "noble old hero."In November 1859, Douglass sailed to England to begin a lecture tour, a trip he had planned long before the incident at Harpers Ferry. The news of his near arrest only increased his popularity with his audiences, and his lectures helped to stir up more sympathy for the antislavery cause. In May 1860, just as he was about to continue his lecture tour in France, word reached him that his youngest child, Annie, had died. Heartbroken over the loss of his daughter, Douglass decided to go home. Glad to be back with his family again, Douglass knew that he was home - and home included not just Rochester but all of America, including the states in the South. It was a home filled with strife, but it was his, and he embraced it all: the land, the people, the Constitution, the Union.ALPHA PHI ALPHA FRATERNITY, INC. & FREDERICK DOUGLASS:We, as men of Alpha Phi Alpha, stand today in the footsteps of Frederick Douglass. If it were not for the inspiration of Douglass, the seven young students on the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca NY may not have thought to turn their study group into a fraternity 100 years ago.
15 years after our founding this fact was acknowledged by the founders themselves as in the presence of three and in the absence of another, who was unable to be in attendance, they blessed the posthumous induction of Frederick Douglass into our dear fraternity.
