Helen Pitts Douglass (1838–1903)

Helen Pitts Douglass (1838–1903) was a teacher and feminist, and the second wife of former slave, abolitionist, and women’s rights advocate Frederick Douglass. She created the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association and spent the last years of her life trying to build a memorial to her deceased husband, who is recognized as the father of the civil rights movement.Helen Pitts was born in 1838 in Honeoye, New York. She attended school at the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, New York, and graduated from Mary Lyon‘s Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in 1859.Frederick DouglassFrederick Douglass (1818-1895) was a famous abolitionist, writer, lecturer and statesman. He was born a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and was given the name Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey. At an early age, he learned to read and write and escaped to freedom in the North, changing his name to Douglass to avoid recapture.
Eventually, he settled in Rochester, New York, and was active in the abolitionist movement. He was a leader of Rochester’s Underground Railroad and became the editor and publisher of the North Star, an abolitionist newspaper. Throughout his life, Douglass remained an outspoken advocate for the rights of African Americans.