In honor of Women's History Month, we are profiling some of the extraordinary women who conceived and shaped our current community development, social justice and anti-racist movements. Their stories may not be widely known, but they should be. And their intelligence, insight, passion and unrelenting efforts blazed the path we walk today.
In the 1830s, when a teenaged Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was enslaved in the Baltimore household of Hugh Auld, teaching himself, painstakingly and largely in secret, to read and write, a young Black woman named Anna Murray was also at work in that city, shouldering the domestic labor of white households.
The families of both these young people had been torn apart by the practice of slavery. Frederick had been separated from his mother so early his memories of her were mere shadows and fragments, and again parted from his maternal grandparents as a young child, “given” by the owner of his plantation birthplace on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to a family member in Baltimore. Anna was the eighth of 12 children—the first who was born free, just a month after her parents’ manumission in rural Denton, MD. She moved to Baltimore at 17 to earn a wage.
It was around this time that Anna and Frederick met, perhaps in church (the details are lost to history), and hatched a plan. Frederick took a train to New York City using false papers, Anna followed shortly after, and the two married there in the home of abolitionist David Ruggles in 1838. “For couples such as Anna and Frederick,” as historian Leigh Fought has written, “forming a family was the privilege of whites and a fortunate few African Americans. To seize that privilege for themselves was an act of subversion…a joint venture undertaken to create a life in which they could have a chance to thrive and protect the integrity of their family to the fullest extent of their abilities.”
Anna Murray Douglass’s role in protecting her family of five children was at least as important as Frederick’s, and her part in the struggle against slavery itself was critical.
Her work has been underrecognized because she was a woman, because she was Black, and because she left little personal record, never having the time or privilege to become expert at the very tool Frederick Douglass saw as a key to Black emancipation and used to such powerful effect—literacy.
In her lifetime, Anna endured countless racist and misogynist insults, even from some “allies” in the Douglasses’ cause. As one English abolitionist wrote, “My fear is that often associating so much with white women of education & refined tastes and manners, [Frederick Douglass] will feel a ‘craving void’ when he returns to his own family.
Their eldest child, Rosetta Douglass Sprague, was determined to testify and set the record straight on her mother’s profound intelligence, accomplishment, resourcefulness and power—and on the family’s strength—most notably in a 1900 speech and later publication, My Mother As I Recall Her.
It was Anna, Rosetta testified, who’d saved her earnings and sold a feather bed to help finance her father’s escape to New York. It was she who brought the fruits of her labor to New Bedford, MA, where the couple settled after marrying—“a feather bed with pillows, bed linen, dishes, knives, forks, and spoons, besides a well filled trunk of wearing apparel for herself,” including the plum-colored silk dress that was her wedding gown.
It was Anna, Rosetta continued, who took in piecework, sewing shoes to keep the family fed and clothed while they lived in Lynn, MA, and when Frederick was embarked on a long lecture tour in Great Britain and Ireland after the publication of his first, bestselling memoir in 1845. And after they moved to Rochester, NY, around 1848, it was Anna who set out special provisions to celebrate each week’s publication of Frederick’s abolitionist North Star, and who, to keep her two small boys safe during summer vacations, suggested they be apprenticed in the publishing enterprise.
All the while, in Massachusetts and later New York, Anna Murray Douglass was an active worker and donor in anti-slavery societies. In Rochester, she became an early agent in the Underground Railroad, helping bring Black fugitives to freedom in Canada. Wrote Rosetta, “It was no unusual occurrence for mother to be called up at all hours of the night, cold or hot as the case might be, to prepare supper for a hungry lot of fleeing humanity.”
It was her mother’s great gift to discern the character of those around her, Rosetta testified, and she was careful about whom she let close. With equal graciousness she welcomed into the Douglass home people “[f]rom the highest dignitaries to the lowliest person, bond or free, white or black.” But if you wanted access to Anna’s own heart and mind you had to earn it. “She could not be known all at once,” Rosetta recalled, “she had to be studied.”
Paralyzed by stroke in 1882, even in her last days Anna displayed fortitude and patience, Rosetta recounted: “She helped us to bear her burden.” Anna died that year at Cedar Hill, the stately home in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C. that the Douglasses had purchased in 1877.
Frederick Douglass deeply grieved his wife of 44 years. Several years later, he remarried, to a white suffragist and daughter of abolitionists, Helen Pitts. After Frederick died in 1895, Helen Pitts Douglass asked his children to donate Cedar Hill as a memorial to their father’s work. They refused, insisting that the accumulated wealth the property represented be shared among Anna and Frederick’s offspring.
In response to an apparently critical published commentary, Rosetta’s own daughter penned a fierce defense of the Douglass children’s position on Cedar Hill. In it, Fredericka Douglass Sprague Perry made it crystal clear the Douglasses saw this home as Anna’s legacy to her children, just as much as Frederick’s to a larger posterity—a home, she wrote, “bought with the money she had saved, with the co-operation of these same children [the commentary’s author] would hold up to ridicule and scorn because at the passing of this father they would dare accept their share of their parent’s earnings.”
With this piece, published in 1933 in Baltimore’s Afro-American under the headline “Granddaughter of Frederick Douglass Defends His Colored Wife,” another Douglass woman stepped up to speak for her mother, for her mother’s mother, and for the value of Black women’s work.