A review by dajoyofit
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

4.0

Where do I begin? How do I begin to organize and prioritize my thoughts and feelings? For one, I could not put this book down. I read this in one day. My heart filled with anger, sorrow, justice, compassion, and determination. There were many poignant moments and times during my reading that I had to pause and take a moment of silence. Its astonishing how relevant to the 21st century so many of his feelings and experiences felt to me. There was a point in his narrative where he spoke of the fears that white men had regarding freed slaves. The fear that free slaves would take over all the jobs of poor whites. A hundred and so years later and we hear this same irrational fear expressed by a certain presidential candidate regarding illegal immigrants of latin/hispanic origins. A hundred + years later and you would think that as a human race we would have risen above the pettiness and irrational fear and prejudice. This was only one of a few parallels I found between the America that Douglas Frederick lived in and the America of 2016.