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          ** UNIT PAGES **     Visit the Retiree Resource page for links to the CWA Retired Members' Council and related websites 
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Frederick Douglass was born in Maryland in 1817 to a white father and a slave. Douglas lived as a slave until he was 21, when he escaped. He headed north and became a popular anti-slavery speaker. In 1847, he began publishing a newspaper for African-Americans, the North Star. He helped shape the Lincoln administration's attitude toward slavery and blacks during the Civil War. Afterwards, he helped form the National Colored Labor Union for newly emancipated black workers. In his later years, he served in various federal posts, including U.S. minister to Haiti. He died in 1895.
Some Douglass Quotes:"If there is no struggle, there is no progress." "I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false and to incur my own abhorrence." "The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose." "People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get." "Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without planting up the ground. They want rain without thunder or lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may not be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will." Picture courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
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