Every Day Is Special: February 14 - Frederick Douglass Day

February 14 - Frederick Douglass Day

Posted on February 14, 2019

In modern society, we tend to shove a lot of special holidays around so that we have long weekends. In the U.S., that means celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday on the third Monday of January, close to his actual birthday, January 15. And we celebrate Presidents Day on the third Monday in February, which always falls between and the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (February 12) and George Washington (February 22).

But in the case of Frederick Douglass, we don't know the actual birthday! Various libraries and schools and historic sites might hold Frederick Douglass Day on some convenient day in February, and some places opted for the known date of his death, February 20 (back in 2010, when I first wrote about Frederick Douglass Day, it was February 20).

It turns out that Douglass himself chose a date to celebrate his birthday - and that date was February 14.

One place that celebrates Frederick Douglass every February is the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site in Washington, D.C. Last fall was the first time I'd ever visited this historic site; I discovered that this house, which he named Cedar Hill, is where he lived the last 17 years of his life, after accepting a position as a United States Marshall from President Rutherford B. Hayes.

Before that, Douglass had lived in several other places. He'd been born into slavery in Maryland; he'd managed to run away by traveling through Delaware (a slave state) into Pennsylvania (a free state) and then to New York City (NY was also a free state). His girlfriend, who had been born free even though she lived in Maryland, traveled to NYC to marry him.

At that point, Douglass wasn't named "Douglass." His mother named him Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey; he called this name "grand" and may have thought it was TOO grand, and so he gave up the two middle names. Once he ran away, it was dangerous to keep his name, so he changed from Bailey to Stanley to Johnson. The latter was the name he had when he got married.

The Johnsons moved to Massachusetts, but they found that the name "Johnson" was way too common. So they changed their last name again, this time to the more unusual Douglass.

Douglass became a preacher, but he also became an abolitionist lecturer and writer, and as an abolitionist he traveled all through the North and even to Europe (Ireland and Great Britain). He began publishing an abolitionist newspaper, began to speak up for women's suffrage, began to talk about ending segregation in schools and transportation (even getting himself thrown off of a Massachusetts train because he refused to sit in the segregated coach assigned to black riders).

As he continued to work - mostly through speaking and writing - for equality for black people and for women, Frederick Douglass continued to travel and at some point moved to Rochester, New York. Like I said before, he ended his life living in D.C.

Douglass was one of the most famous and respected Black people in America during his lifetime. Check out some of his words of wisdom:

I remember hearing that Douglass, a few
weeks before his death, was asked what
advice he would give a young black American.
The quote below is what he answered: