Frederick Douglass and the Birthday that Symbolized Freedom

Cultural Calendar

February 14, 2025

As a truly towering figure in history, Frederick Douglass was an escaped slave who became an impassioned activist, abolitionist, and icon. His eloquence on the subject of equality and acceptance remains just as timely today as it was over two hundred years ago. “I would unite with anybody to do right,” he once said, “and with nobody to do wrong.”

However, it is an ironic fact that the brilliant Frederick Douglass would surely appreciate that while we now honor his birth date each February 14, Douglass himself was, until late in his life, not entirely sure of the date of his birth. Like many former slaves, he had never known his birthday, a fact that had caused him pain throughout his life. “It has been a source of great annoyance to me, never to have a birthday,” he wrote to a companion.

He later revealed these feelings to one of his former owners, Captain Thomas Auld, in 1877. “I told him I had always been curious to know how old I was and that it had been a serious trouble to me, to not know when was my birthday.” Auld, on his deathbed at the time, told Douglass that he wasn’t sure of that date, but that he believed that Douglass had been born in February 1818, a fact later confirmed by a ledger now kept in the Maryland Archives.

Frederick Douglass later celebrated his seventy-first birthday in 1888, in a public event honoring him by the Bethel Literary Society in Washington, D.C. After several guests spoke for the occasion, Douglass took the stage and spoke movingly about the unexpected complexity of the concept of a birthday as a former slave.

Douglass began his speech with a humorous reference to the fact that people were celebrating his seventy-first birthday. “What in the world have you been doing that for?” he asked. “Why, Frederick Douglass. That day was taken from him long before he had the means of owning it. Birthdays belong to free institutions. We, at the South, never knew them. We were born at times: harvest times, watermelon times, and generally hard times. I never knew anything about the celebration of a birthday except Washington’s birthday, and it seems a little strange to have mine celebrated. I think it is hardly safe to celebrate any man’s birthday while he lives.”

Frederick Douglass passed away on February 20, 1895, still fighting to the very end for social justice. The very next year, the Bethel Literary society once again celebrated his birthday. As the years passed, schools began observing “Douglass Day,” with celebrations in dozens of cities across the U.S. through the years, and which eventually led to the celebration of Black History Month and the more formal recognitions of his truly towering achievements, at last… on his birthday.

Learn more:

https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-story-behind-the-frederick-douglass-birthday-celebration

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