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“Faith of Our Fathers”
Washington City Paper
For an unabashed radical, Frederick Douglass did all right by America.
A runaway slave, his take on the pursuit of happiness would have
made the founding fathers cringe. Yet he made the transition from
soapbox to pedestal in a country and age that worshiped wild ambition.
Indeed, his life story might have been lifted from a Victorian melodrama.
His father (identity unknown) was white; his mother was a slave.
He entered the world a piece of property, but later purchased a
gentrified estate in Anacostia (zoned for whites only). He married
an illiterate black woman and divorced her to remarry a white seminary
graduate. This is the essence of Douglass: Rather than toe the color
line, he crossed it every chance he got…
1995
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