On the recordOctober 18, 2017
I rise tonight to join my House colleagues, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton and Congressman Andy Harris, to celebrate the passage of H.R. 2989, a bill to create a commission to honor Frederick Douglass in 2018, in the bicentennial of his birth. Frederick Douglass was enslaved at birth on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1818; yet he learned to read and write. He escaped from Maryland and moved to New York. In 1845, he published his first autobiography, ``The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave.'' He later escaped to Great Britain to avoid being returned to slavery. British Quakers paid for his freedom, which enabled him to return to United States, settling in Baltimore, MD, in 1847; yet he continued to be a strong abolitionist who campaigned against slavery and in favor of the right to vote throughout the east and midwest. In 1850, he oversaw the Underground Railroad in Rochester, NY. Douglass made four trips back to the place of his birth in Talbot County, MD. He reconciled with Captain Thomas Auld, who had enslaved him in the past. He made a pilgrimage to Tappers Corner in search of his grandmother's cabin and his birthplace. Moreover, he invested in the African-American community in Maryland through housing developments in his old neighborhood in Fells Point, now named Douglass Place, and at Highland Beach, a summer resort community outside of Annapolis.…
