Beheler 2
Thomas Beheler
Professor Gulliksen
English 231 D01
28 January 2019
The Oppression of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was an African American born sometime within the month of February in 1818 to an African American mother and a white father, who presumably was her master as she was a slave, on a plantation in Tuckahoe, Maryland. He was born into slavery just as his siblings were, and he never was able to establish the connection that family members took for granted back then or even today. From being separated from his mother at an early age, to seeing his Aunt Hester being whipped and punished when he was a mere seven or eight years old, to witnessing the brutality and lack of sympathy shown by his overseers and masters from committing numerous acts of murder towards their slaves, it became apparent that Douglass experienced countless examples of racism and oppression just from being born into slavery and also living the life of a slave for the first twenty years of his life until finally freeing himself of said chains in the September of 1838.
While there are plenty of disturbing memories throughout Frederick Douglass’ autobiography entitled, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, the most disturbing part of the excerpt within the textbook has to be the oppression Douglass experienced from his master, Hugh Auld, as well as the effect he had on his wife, Sophia Auld, when she had begun to teach him a few letters of the alphabet and how to spell basic words using them, and then because of Mr. Auld those lessons came to an abrupt halt. The feeling of defeat and paralysis that Douglass must have felt from being denied the knowledge he sought most had to be self-deprecating to his goals of ...
