Frederick Douglass's dramatic autobiographical account of his early life as a slave in America.

Born into a life of bondage, Frederick Douglass secretly taught himself to read and write. It was a crime punishable by death, but it resulted in one of the most eloquent indictments of slavery ever recorded. His gripping narrative takes us into the fields, cabins, and manors of pre-Civil War plantations in the South and reveals the daily terrors he suffered as a slave.

Written more than a century and a half ago by an African-American who went on to become a famous orator, U.S....

Douglass, Ellison and Marley lived on racial frontiers. Their interactions with mixed audiences made them key figures in an interracial consciousness and culture, integrative ancestors who can be claimed by more than one group. An abolitionist who criticized black racialism; the author of Invisible Man, a landmark of modernity and black literature; a musician whose allegiance was to "God's side, who cause me to come from black and white." The lives of these three men illustrate how our notions of "race" have been constructed out of a repression of the interracial.