Frederick Douglass lesson

Hi! Future Ticia 2024 here, I wrote this way back when my kids were in preschool and before knowing a thing about the best way to write, and future Ticia has realized, realistically both Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass each deserve their own post. They are both AMAZING people and some of the people I most admire from American history. Since I’m updating this right before February, which is Frederick Douglass’ birth month, I’m going to turn this into a Frederick Douglass history lesson. I think I’m even going to clear off my table and turn this into a Lego history lesson, because I haven’t written one of those in years, and I miss them. Let’s dive into some American history!

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I’m going to essentially write a brand new post, and then update the original post at the bottom.

Frederick Douglass resources

There are so many Frederick Douglass resources, that really you could do an entire unit just on him. I’m going to share all that I found or used with my quick searches. I did not use all of these each time we studied him, but it’s useful to have all of them.

Frederick Douglass online resources

These are the resources I used when teaching my kids history during high school. I did a fair amount of research, and took notes then gave them a lecture (this is the basis for the LEGO history lesson I’m about to write and take pictures for, after lunch). From this I created a writing prompt, and quiz questions (yes, at some point I’m releasing a pseudo-history curriculum).

• History Frederick Douglass
• Biography Frederick Douglass
• Encyclopedia Britannica Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass booklist

Since Frederick Douglass is one of those NAMES in American history, my library has several books on him.

If you are studying him during high school years, and you have the ability, I would highly recommend reading his autobiography. Since he has five of them (a fact I found out when The Artist had to read a biography and I recommended his), this is the one I read in college and sadly ran out of time to assign it to my kids (curse you dual enrollment!): Narrative of a Life of Frederick Douglass.

I’m copying from my Underground Railroad book list the specific books on him. I lied, since that was specifically the Underground Railroad, I didn’t have any books on him, because he worked in a different area of the abolitionists movement.

I have not read these books, YET. I will be going to the library to check on them as soon as possible.

• Frederick Douglass– looks to be an early nonfiction book, but it looks to have actual photographs
• Frederick Douglass: the lion who wrote history– the illustrations in here look really solid
• Frederick Douglass: a noble life– David A. Adler is on my trusted kids biography authors list
• Frederick Douglass for kids: his life and times with 21 activities– I’ve gotten others from this series and it is solid
• Frederick Douglass– this is great if your kid is in 3-5 grade and need a resource for a paper
• A picture book of Frederick Douglass– the “a picture book” series is awesome, again by David Adler
• Who Was Frederick Douglass?– I’ve heard decent things about this series
• Two friends: Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass-I always forget these two were friends
• Friends for Freedom: the story of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass– my library copy has a different cover than the Amazon book, the Amazon cover is a bit more inflammatory while my library’s copy is a bit more dignified. It’s an interesting look at portraying different ideas
• Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass: the story behind an American friendship– another person I’d forgotten he was friends with
• Words set me free: the story of young Frederick Douglass– I can’t wait to read this one

The rest of the books my library has are all group books of several people, which would be good for a different purpose.

Frederick Douglass YouTube videos

I found some pretty amazing videos on him.

Biographics is a solid channel.

I know PragerU is controversial, but it’s also a good quick overview of his history.

And then finally I found this great video of James Earl Jones reading one of Frederick Douglass’ most iconic speeches.

I should go look and see if there are any movies about him. If there isn’t that is a clearly giant gap in our filmography.

Frederick Douglass LEGO history

Okay, I’m going to try and keep this somewhat brief, and if I wanted to, I could write an entire series of posts, like his childhood is fascinating.

Frederick Douglass was born in Maryland, sometime in February 1818, or so he thinks. Firm records were not kept for enslaved people, and realistically speaking most people didn’t keep firm records of birthdates. He later chose February 14 as his birthdate (I do not know why), and this is why Black History Month is in February, because it’s his birthday (I’ve always wondered why it was in February).

But back to his life. His early life was hard, but a couple of things that enabled him to escape. First, he learned how to read. That is a BIG deal. Next, he learned a trade, and he was hired out to other people. As a result he was allowed to keep a percentage of what was earned, and he was allowed to hire out his time on his own, which allowed him to keep a larger percentage of his money.

Then I double checked how he escaped slavery, and realized I was completely wrong, so I built a LEGO train really quickly. It was sitting in the room as I was trying to decide if I wanted to keep the set or give it as a present to a younger kid. The answer became obvious when I discovered my need for a train, and then I used the market booths to stand in for some later scenes. Yes, I did take a break from my pictures to build LEGOs.

He tried a couple of different times to escape, but he was in Baltimore and had a certain amount of freedom, and was able to both read and write, so he used a pass claiming he had the right to take the train elsewhere, and just rode the train North to escape.

Talk about bold!

From there, he found a job, and eventually got hooked into the abolitionist movement. He worked with William Lloyd Garrison, the name in the abolitionist movement for a while, he went on speaking tours, and eventually even wrote down his first autobiography. At which point, he went to Europe for a time because he published his former owner’s name, and everyone in the abolitionist movement didn’t want him to be recaptured. He traveled Europe and met European royalty, during which time funds were raised to buy his freedom and he was able to come back to the United States as an officially freed man.

Now, obviously one of his desires was for all men to be freed, and for a short time he worked with John Brown, you know of Harper’s Ferry, but then he realized just HOW FAR John Brown was willing to go, and Frederick Douglass really didn’t think that was going to work, because he knew what it was like down South, so he broke with John Brown before the infamous raid on Harper’s Ferry.

Time continued and he started up a newspaper. Yes, I’m not putting dates because I didn’t put any dates in my notes.

His newspaper worked stridently to abolish slavery and its’ motto was “Right is of no Sex – Truth is of no Color – God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren.” And that line, “Right is of no Sex,” that’s one of those big deal statements which leads to the next cool thing he did.

Y’all, Frederick Douglass went to the Seneca Falls Convention.

But Ticia, you’re saying, what is Seneca Falls.

It’s one of the very early steps towards women getting the vote nationally in the United States. Somehow in my head this happened after the Civil War, but I was incorrect, this happened before it.

Now there are a couple of key things to tell you about this, first he was the only African American man to attend.

Next, he was one of the few men who attended, and at this point women’s rights were firmly aligned with abolition. There would be a rather dramatic breaking apart later on as the disagreement on priorities became a bigger problem.

He even ran for president on the Republican ticket in 1848, another thing I thought happened AFTER the Civil War, but I was incorrect. He was the very first African American to run for president.

He even worked with Abraham Lincoln while he was president, but ultimately ended up parting ways with the president after the war, but before Lincoln was assassinated, because he was frustrated the Lincoln freed the slaves, but did not give them the vote.

His frustration with Lincoln did not stop him from still working with the government from time to time. He held several different offices including ambassador to the Dominican Republic and president of the Freedman’s Bank.

But, he did run again for national office, this time as the vice-president candidate with Virginia Woodhull as the presidential candidate.

This was a very brief run through of all the cool things Frederick Douglass did in his life, but I hadn’t quite planned today to spend two hours putting all of this together. Some point soon, hopefully, I’ll have time to write more.

Past Ticia’s Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman lesson

I had fabulous plans for what I was going to do for these two brave people.  Glorious plans, first we were going to read these two books:

• Moses: when Harriet Tubman led her people to freedom– while this isn’t a nonfiction book, this is my favorite Harriet Tubman book on the list. It looks like this book is both a Caldecott AND a Coretta Scott King winner
  • My original comments: I highly recommend “Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led her People to Freedom.”  It’s very poetic and lyrical in writing style.  Also the illustrations are wonderful.
• Frederick Douglass: the Last Day of Slavery– our library no long has this book, so I’m going based on the Amazon description, it’s a fictionalized account of how he escaped enslavement
  • “Fredrick Douglass: Last Day of Slavery,” is also good, but it’s a more difficult read and is much longer.  I edited it a little bit while I was reading it to everyone, but it’s a hard book to sit through, partially for the subject matter.

Which we did, and then we were going to make Underground Railroad quilts.  Like the ones in the Quilt Code.  But, here’s the problem, the more I read about them being Hidden in Plain View, the more I found out it probably didn’t happen that way.

So, it’s more of an urban legend than fact.  That, and it would take a lot of work to get those shapes ready for a group of kids to do it……  A LOT of work……….

Instead, I found a list of slave states and free states right before the Civil War, and we very carefully colored in the different types of states and created a key.

It’s not very exciting, or interesting to write about, but it was interesting to realize things.  Like, I always forget Maryland was a slave state, I don’t know why.  Or how much harder it was for a slave to escape from South Carolina versus Maryland.

If we hadn’t been studying the maps we wouldn’t have noticed these things.

Future Ticia 2024 butting in here

When we restudied Maryland a few years ago I made mini-books for our Maryland Unit, so now if you join my newsletter, you’ll get access to the subscriber page where the Maryland printables are.

More great learning ideas

We studied Frederick Douglass in kindergarten (for our Maryland Unit), then as part of US history in 2nd grade, and then again in 6th grade as we completed the four year history cycle with Modern History, and then one last time in 10th grade for our final cycle of history.

Huh, I don’t have a Modern History landing page yet. I clearly must work on that.

But, I’m going to share some ideas from each of those years of history.

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