13. Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass is a truly legendary person. Born into slavery in Maryland in 1818, Douglass managed to teach himself to read in secret while still a slave, believing that literacy was the path to freedom. With the aid of a free black woman with whom he’d fallen in love, Douglass escaped slavery in 1838. He married Anna Murray, who helped him reach freedom, only 11 days after he reached her home in New York.
Despite being a self-taught reader, Douglass published the famous autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, an abolitionist work so eloquent that many scholars of the era argued that a black man would have been incapable of writing it. He went on to write further abolitionist works My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.
In addition to fighting for the abolition of slavery and equal rights of black Americans, Douglass also fought for women’s suffrage. He was the only black person to attend the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights in 1848, at which Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked for a resolution in favor of suffrage. Douglass spoke eloquently in support and helped secure the resolution’s passage. While Douglass indeed was handsome, it hardly bears mentioning next to the towering weight of his accomplishments.
