This chapter reviews the varied and creative ways people have taught Frederick Douglass’s four autobiographies and weighs methods for inspiring critical thought and performance skills through Douglass’s speeches. Douglass’s 1845 Narrative is used at multiple levels of education as a platform for reflecting on what literacy is and how Douglass – and students themselves – have become literate in their world. Other teachers consider how Douglass has constituted himself in relation to audiences he wished to move to political action, reflecting on his self-portraits and shaping of key incidents in his life. The chapter also advocates for offering students a choice of speech events to analyze and perform. This helps them to refine their thinking about contemporary issues and make performance decisions, imagining how Douglass – and they, too – wish to move an audience.

The chapter discusses Douglass’s three major autobiographical narratives – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892) – in multiple and sometimes competing contexts. Taken together, Douglass’s autobiographies, which are indebted to the American autobiographical tradition established by Benjamin Franklin, reveal a black leader who regularly revises himself and his ideas. The Narrative appears to advocate William Lloyd Garrison’s moral suasionism and to draw on the slave narrative tradition. But Douglass worked against that tradition when he revised the Narrative for publication in Ireland in 1845 and 1846. In the 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass emphasized his close connections to the black community and his support for revolutionary violence. His monumental Life and Times, written near the end of his career, linked the struggles and contingencies of his own life with that of the nation.

As the preeminent black orator and author of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass filled his speeches and writings with intertextual references, from the Western classical tradition to the Bible to contemporaneous British and American writers. In his various roles as antislavery activist, writer, editor, and publisher, Douglass employed intertexts as tools of rhetorical suasion and authority.As his fame grew, so too did the complexity and range of literary references. This essay looks at intertexts in Douglass’s speeches, his 1845 Narrative, and his 1853 novella, The Heroic Slave.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), which has appeared in more than four hundred editions, is one of the most enduring and widely available African American texts. More than three dozen editions of the book have appeared in print since 1990. The variety of editions includes an ever-expanding body of paratexts such as chronologies, notes, bibliographies, and study guides, which reveal the extent to which publishers, editors, and scholars continually redesign Douglass’s book for new generations of readers. Investigations of Narrative editions and paratexts enhance views of one of our most well-known writers and books.

Douglass achieved international celebrity in his lifetime; thus his bicentennial was celebrated internationally. Still, despite his iconic status, Douglass's bicentennial remained more of a lowkey and highly decentralized affair due to complex converging historical forces. Nonetheless, the communities that celebrated Douglass in 2017–19 continue to plan for additional and more enduring commemorations in the years and decades to come.