This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies in For Terry Gross. This week, HBO premiered a new documentary about 19th century abolitionist and Orator Frederick Douglass.

It features several distinguished actors reading from Douglass' speeches and his autobiographies. Here's actress Nicole Bajari reading from Douglass' 1852 speech, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.

What do I or those I represent have to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice embodied in that declaration extended to us?

What to the American Slave is your Fourth of July?

I answer a day that reveals to him more than any other days of the year the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

To him, your celebration is a sham. Your national greatness swelling vanity. Your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless, your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock.

The existence of slavery in this country brands your humanity as base pretense and your Christianity as a lie.

The documentary titled Fred Rick Douglass in five speeches is inspired by historian David Blight's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Douglass.

Today we'll listen to some of my 2018 interview with Blight, who's a professor of history at Yale.

Blight's book deals with Douglass' autobiographies, which describe his escape from slavery to freedom, but it also illuminates less well-known parts of Douglass' long and remarkable life.

His break with abolitionist William Lord Garrison, his complicated personal life, his support forp and bitter feud with leaders of the women's suffrage movement, and his years as a Republican Party functionary when he took patronage jobs in the government.

Douglass was a powerful orator, and Blight says the most photographed person of the 19th century.

Blight's book is Fredrick Douglass' Prophet of Freedom.

Well David Blight, welcome back to Fresh Air. Tell us about Fredrick Douglass' early life. Where was he born? What was his life like as a slave?

Well first thank you David, it's great to be back on Fresh Air. Fredrick Douglass was born along a horseshoe bend in the Tuckahoe River on the eastern shore of Maryland.

In 1818 it's kind of a remote backwater at that point of the American Slave Society. He was born on the Home Hill Farm, which was owned by his then master Aaron Anthony.

His mother was a still young woman named Harriet Bailey. He was probably born in his grandmother Betsy Bailey's cabin although we don't know for sure.

And he never will know exactly who his father was, although when candidate is Aaron Anthony himself, Douglass was always told that his father was his master or one of his masters.

So one of the facts of his youth that everyone should know is that he was in essence in orphan. He never knew his father and he never saw his mother after the age of six.

And he had to practically invent images of her. He had very little memory of her.

So as a child he's essentially not altogether abandoned but he's left without parents and then he grows up for 20 years as a slave.

About 11 of them on the eastern shore and about nine of those years in Baltimore, which in fact the city has everything to do with the fact that he would ever be able to escape.

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