C You may never see young men wearing baseball caps emblazoned with his name. His birthday may never be declared a national holiday. Yet few blacks loom larger over American history than Frederick Douglass, the subject of a 90-minute special on PBS this evening.
Born a slave in Talbot County on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Douglass (1818-1895) rose from unimaginable hardship to become a prominent abolitionist, an inspired orator and an early champion of women's rights.
Though he remains a giant of 19th century American history whose autobiographies have been required reading for generations, Douglass has never commanded the cultural spotlight the way Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X have. But that could be changing.
At a time when young men and women in the inner cities are in desperate need of role models, historians and educators see in Douglass a man who overcame poverty and hopelessness -- a man who fought against conditions certainly the equal of any faced by teen-agers today. They are hoping the PBS film, along with commemorations planned for next year to mark the centennial of Douglass' death, will make him more visible to young people.
"His is a very inspirational story for many blacks and whites today," says Samuel Banks, executive director of compensatory education for the Baltimore school system. "He was prophetic in talking about being black and beautiful. 'Black and proud,' as James Brown sang in the '60s -- Douglass had already said it."
Certainly, few men of the past century have such continuing relevance to today's hot topics. Douglass felt his life alone was enough to refute those who preached the genetic inferiority of blacks. Yet a new book, "The Bell Curve," created a national furor by arguing that blacks, as a group, are less intelligent than whites and Asians.
Douglass believed the rights of the Constitution applied not only to all peoples, but to both sexes -- emerging as one of the influential men in the women's rights movements in the late 19th century. But just last month a Baltimore County judge sentenced a man who killed his wife hours after finding her in bed with another man to only 18 months in prison, leaving some wondering if the laws are even now applied equally to men and women.
And, in 1891, Douglass resigned his post as Ambassador to Haiti after becoming embroiled in an international power play there. Haiti continues to bedevil American foreign policy makers more than a century later.
"Frederick Douglass: When the Lion Wrote History" will air on PBS at 9 p.m. It was produced and directed by Orlando Bagwell, a native Baltimorean also responsible for "Malcolm X: Make It Plain" (which aired on PBS' "The American Experience" earlier this year) and two episodes of the acclaimed "Eyes on the Prize" civil rights documentary.
Narrated by actress Alfre Woodard, "When the Lion Wrote History" interweaves Douglass' own words (as read by actor Charles Dutton of television's "Roc") with film of the Eastern Shore plantation where he was taken at age 6 and the Baltimore neighborhoods he worked in as a teen-ager and from which he escaped to freedom at age 20. Other parts of the film were shot in New Bedford, Mass. (where escaped slave Frederick Bailey took the name Douglass, from a character in the Sir Walter Scott poem "The Lady of the Lake"); Rochester, N.Y. (where he lived much of his adult life and was a neighbor of women's rights leader Susan B. Anthony), and Washington. where his last home, Cedar Hill, is now a National Historic Site.
"His personal story, raising himself from a position where he is living in slavery to where he'd become a major voice on the political as well as social scene, is one that's very important for young people today," says Mr. Bagwell, founder and president of Boston-based ROJA Productions, a film and television production company. "He raised himself out of what may have been the worst condition for any people at any time in our country."
While "When the Lion Wrote History" may be the first major television documentary on Douglass' life, it is not the first time audiences have been introduced to the man. Fred Marsell has been performing his one-act play, "Presenting Mr. Frederick Douglass," for nearly a decade. In front of schools and churches, youth groups and tourists, Mr. Marsell has donned his black and gray-streaked wig to speak the words of a man he believes delivers a message that still needs to be heard.
"When I do [his] speeches," Mr. Marsell says from a dressing room at the Roland Park Country School, where he's just finished addressing the lower school, "people tend to be very surprised, somewhat stunned, to realize that he was speaking about things that are so clearly applicable today . . . and that he spoke with such vigor and forthrightness about racism and the means to resolve it and what it's doing to our society."
Perhaps no better argument for the need to remember Frederick Douglass exists than that offered by John B. Wiseman, a history professor at Frostburg State University. For years, he has fought to make Douglass a more honored part of Maryland history. In April, he wrote a column in The Sun advocating that a portion of Route 50 on the Eastern Shore be renamed the "Frederick Douglass Freedom Road."
"When I ran that piece, I received only one written response," he says. "Someone had cut out the article and written at the top the following: 'You must be kidding. The only thing that Maryland thinks about Douglass is that he's an uppity Negro.' "