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Frederick Douglass (c. 1818 – 1895) was an escaped slave who became an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He was separated from his mother as an infant, raised by his grandmother till the age of six, and was then owned and hired by a succession of masters. Escaping by railroad in 1838, he settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, then an abolitionist center full of former slaves. He became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. This photograph of Douglass was taken around 1879.Photograph credit: George Kendall Warren