February 10 - Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

Douglass tried to escape slavery twice before he was successful in running away as a fugitive. He escaped to Massachusetts with the help of his soon-to-be-wife, a free Black woman from Baltimore named Anna Murray, who later joined him in Massachusetts., where the two were married by a former fugitive slave.

Although his marriage papers listed him as "Frederick Johnson", it was here that Douglass was no longer known by his slave name of “Frederick Bailey”, or even the married name of “Frederick Johnson”, but he became best known as “Frederick Douglass”. Being a run-away slave, Douglass had to assume false names to avoid capture, and he took the name “Douglass” “from Sir Walter Scott’s 1810 epic poem ‘Lady of the Lake’”.

But there was another reason for Douglass changing his name: to vote.