Frederick Douglass
1818-1895 19th century
Refusing to confuse God with what is done in his name.
Who was Frederick Douglass?
Born a slave in Maryland, taken from his mother as an infant, he learned to read in secret and escaped at twenty disguised as a sailor. He became the most listened-to voice of American abolition, a lay preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and all his life distinguished the religion of Christ from the religion of slaveholders. He lived to see slavery abolished, and went on fighting.
In their own words
I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.
Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.
I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle, so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear.
The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.