Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, around 1818. Douglass initially lived with his maternal grandmother, Betty Bailey. At a young age, Douglass was selected to live in the home of the plantation owners, one of whom may have been his father. His mother, an intermittent presence in his life, died when he was around 10.Fredrick Douglass was one of the strongest minded people in his time. He was a black abolitionist who basically travels around the world to fight for equal rights in the United States. As a young boy, he was taught how to read the alphabets by Auld’s wife. Sophia, when he found out that his wife was teaching him how to read and write he to her to stop and that it was forbidding and dangerous to teach a slave how to read and write. As years went by Douglass was teaching himself how to read and write. He finally escaped at the age of 20.

In his life, he fought for a lot of things like women rights, the Irish home rules and a so made a speech about the July 4th titled The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro. In this speech, Frederick Douglass basically just went on saying that he knows the 4th of July is a very proud day for the U.S, because it was a day when the U.S defeated England in a war (American Revolution) to be their own independent country. He praised the founding fathers of the U.S and told the people what they believed in and stand for as humans and why they wrote the declaration of independence. Saying all that, he, later on, told them that their founding fathers did not fight for them to get their freedom all just for them to have slaves.