How Did Frederick Douglass Show Courage

Long before Martin Luther King Jr. stood before the American people and gave his powerful “I Have A Dream” speech, slaves braved the consequences of racism in the United States for over a century. Slaves underwent tremendous hardships, most of the time with no opportunity for escape. However, Frederick Douglass, a man born into slavery displayed courage, intelligence and racial pride throughout his life to eventually escape the nightmare that was slavery. Douglass used an extraordinary amount of courage to administrate and successfully carry out his escape. His aptitude and leadership abilities also greatly impacted the abolitionist movements of his time. Douglass’s racial pride was a major aspect of his success and motivation. As a result

When Douglass was around 8 years old, he came under a new master and the master’s wife began teaching Douglass the alphabet. After Douglass had learned a few small words, the slave owner found out and forbade his wife to teach Douglass any further. After the severe reaction from his owner, Frederick Douglass “. . . understood, as had many black men and women, that on this control of knowledge rested ‘the white man’s power to enslave the black man’” (Katz 44). It was these circumstances that motivated Douglass to become fully literate so he could eventually devise his own escape. Thus, Douglass taught himself to read and tried to get his hands on any book that he could find. Learning how to read was a blessing and a curse to Douglass, writing, “The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers. I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers, who had left their homes, and hone to Africa, and stolen us from our homes, and in a strange land reduced us to slavery” (45). The ability to read shed a new light on the immorality of slavery. Intelligence is where Douglass found his persistent dedication to freedom. For a slave,their only true possessions where their ideas and values. For this reason, racial pride was critical to a slave’s survival. John Blassingame, a scholar, historian and pioneer in the study of American slavery writes this about the slaves’ dignity, “However oppressive or dehumanizing the plantation was, the struggle for survival was not severe enough to crush all of the slave’s creative instincts. . . . His thoughts, values, ideals and behavior were all great influenced by these processes” (41). Slaves deeply depended on their culture to unite them throughout the perils of