Meet Anna Murray Douglass, first wife to Frederick Douglass.
Anna helped Frederick escape enslavement. Anna was the first of her siblings to be born free after her parents were manumitted. When she met Frederick she was financially prepared to start a life with him but first, he needed freedom. By borrowing a freedman’s protection certificate from a friend and wearing the disguise of a sailor sewn by Anna, Frederick made his way to New York City by train, spending Anna’s money to buy the ticket. She continued to support his abolitionist work for the rest of her life. There is no Frederick Douglass without Anna Murray Douglass. Protect Black women at all costs.
Anna Murray Douglass was an American abolitionist, member of the Underground Railroad, and the first wife of Frederick Douglass, from 1838 to her death.
In the 1830s, when a teenaged Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was enslaved in the Baltimore household of Hugh Auld, teaching himself, painstakingly and largely in secret, to read and write, a young Black woman named Anna Murray was also at work in that city, shouldering the domestic labor of white households.
The families of both these young people had been torn apart by the practice of slavery. Frederick had been separated from his mother so early his memories of her were mere shadows and fragments, and again parted from his maternal grandparents as a young child, “given” by the owner of his plantation birthplace on Maryland’s Eastern Shore to a family member in Baltimore. Anna was the eighth of 12 children—the first who was born free, just a month after her parents’ manumission in rural Denton, MD. She moved to Baltimore at 17 to earn a wage.
It was around this time that Anna and Frederick met, perhaps in church (the details are lost to history), and hatched a plan. Frederick took a train to New York City using false papers, Anna followed shortly after, and the two married there in the home of abolitionist David Ruggles in 1838.