Special to the AFRO
While the exact date of his birth remains a mystery, Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery in or around 1818, in Talbot County, Md., said in his autobiography that he settled on celebrating Feb. 14 as his birthday, remembering that his mother called him her “Little Valentine.”
Then, following his successful escape from slavery in 1838, and in an act of self-determination and safety, he renamed himself, from Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey to Frederick Douglass.
Historians now regard Douglass, a self-taught man who would become a social reformer, orator, writer, statesman and an abolitionist, as the most important leader in the struggle for Black civil rights in the 19th century…