7 Interesting facts about Frederick Douglass
His second wife was white
Douglass was first married to Anna Murray Douglass, the child of slaves who helped Frederick escape slavery and served as financial planner for their family, until she died in 1882.
In 1884, a 66-year-old Douglass remarried, being wed to 46-year-old educator Helen Pitts, the daughter of a white abolitionist who had been friends with the famed black orator.
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“Frederick and Helen Pitts Douglass faced a storm of controversy as a result of their marriage. Interracial marriages were still a rarity, and illegal in some states,” explained the History of American Women Blog.
“Although Helen’s father Gideon Pitts was an abolitionist friend to Douglass and the Pitts home was a stop on the Underground Railroad, her family were against the marriage and stopped talking to her. Douglass’ children felt his marriage was a repudiation of their African American mother.”
For his part, Douglass believed there was much hypocrisy in the outrage over his interracial marriage, writing that those “who had remained silent over the unlawful relations of white slave masters with their colored slave women loudly condemned me for marrying a wife a few shades lighter than myself.”
“They would have had no objection to my marrying a person much darker in complexion than myself, but to marry one much lighter, and of the complexion of my father rather than of that of my mother, was, in the popular eye, a shocking offense, and one for which I was to be ostracized by white and black alike,” he added.
