Welcome to the American Story. Mostly true stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one, this was a man.

The first thing I can This was a man.

The first thing I can remember about Frederick Douglas is his picture. It wasn't some book I was reading when I was a boy in the 1950s.

I learned only later that it was not surprising that my first acquaintance with Douglas should be to see him. Just a hundred years before in the 1850s, Frederick Douglas was much more famous than

Abraham Lincoln.

And when he died in 1895, The Chicago Tribune editorialized that no man, black or white, has been better

known for nearly half a century in this country than Frederick Douglass. But life, education, and feign being uncertain as they are, I had never heard of him

until I looked at a picture of him over half a century after he was gone. It was a riveting photograph, a headshot. As I remember the moment now, my thought looking at it was, he looks fierce, independent. There is fire in him.

I was only 10 or 11, but I thought something like that.

It made me want to learn more about the man in the picture, and so I eventually read more

about him and most important.

I read what he wrote him by himself, starting with his first great autobiographical work.

He called it narrative of the life of Frederick Douglas, an American slave written by himself. It tears your heart out. And as I read his other

writings and got to know him better, I came to love the man, though in some ways he is not easy to love, he is so fierce.

And learning, working the way it does, he has been my companion, my dear friend even, ever since.

And I've kept getting to know him better, as you do with friends.

Douglas was born into slavery as Frederick Bailey in rural Maryland in 18.

With determination, courage, some help from others, and good luck.

He managed to escape to freedom when he was 20 years old on September 3rd, 1838.

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