Frederick Douglass

Introduction

In the West Belfast International Wall, highlights this powerful image of a black man who is said he fled from slavery by two Irish, who arrived in Ireland during the Great Famine and became a champion of the abolition of slavery , the rights of women and Irish freedom, three great causes. Frederick Douglass is one of the great figures of the nineteenth century. Recalling his life we ??will continue with that storyline so curious that we have discovered about the relationship between blacks and Ireland (Obama, the candidate afroirlandés the U.S. presidency, the movie quote that "the Irish are the blacks of Europe "the flamboyant mayor of Portlaoise Nigerian ...).

"Maybe any kind of prejudice against color has reached a dangerous point with the Irish and yet no country has been more relentlessly oppressed on account of race or religion."(Frederick Douglass).

Born a slave in Maryland (USA) in 1818, but the life of Frederick Douglass is not like the others. In 1830 the wife of his new master, Sophia Auld, broke the law by teaching the rudiments of the alphabet. Since then, as he wrote in his' Account of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, "Frederick strove to learn to read by paying a few white kids in his class neighborhood with lots of bread and see how many fell in their writings hands. In 1837 he escaped from their masters disguised as a sailor with false documentation freed from overseas. Already in Massachusetts, at age 23 gave his first lecture recounting his experience of slavery and began working with the Anti-Slavery Society, giving lectures throughout the eastern and mid-east.

In 1945 he published his autobiography, which was surprised by his careful style and reaped an immediate national and international success (it was translated into French and Dutch). His friends warned him of the risks involved in the publication of the book, fearing the reaction of his former master, Hugh Auld, so I encouraged him to leave the country and travel to Ireland, where he arrived just when had begun to produce the Great Famine in the island because of a blight on the potato. There he met and befriended the Irish nationalist Daniel O'Connell, leader of the movement for Catholic emancipation. The support for this cause Douglass earned the nickname "The Black O'Connell" (the black O'Connell).

Douglass also visited Britain, where he gave several lectures, mainly in Protestant churches, remaining in the islands for two years during which claimed to have been treated no "as a black man, but as a man." Despite being poorly received, with banners reading "Expel the black" by members of the Free Church of Scotland, who had been criticized Douglass for accepting money from U.S. slave traders, was generally respected for his defense any form of egalitarian and democratic representation, not only equality in the field of religious beliefs and races, but also on women's rights and, in the case of Ireland, Catholic Emancipation. In the same vein, much later, in 1892 during the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, show your support for the Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell.

Discussion and Analysis

At the beginning of 1847 he returned to ...