Reading Frederick Douglass Together
Our Purpose
Reading Frederick Douglass Together is a project that uses the words and ideas of Frederick Douglass to create a community of individuals who are passionate about keeping the Douglass legacy alive. Our group travels to different communities in Indiana to hold interactive readings and discussions about Douglass's most revolutionary speeches. See an event near you? Join us for a fun and educational time of community building!
Our History
In the early 2000s, a group of private citizens began to organize annual public readings each July of Douglass’s iconic “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” at the historic Boston Commons as a springboard for discussion of the status of current race relations. The Massachusetts Humanities took over leadership of this program and sponsors dozens of such public readings across that state each July.
The year 2018 marked the 200th anniversary of Douglass’s birth. The Frederick Douglass Papers, which is preparing a modern 15-volume scholarly edition of Douglass’s speeches, letters, journalism, and autobiographies for the Yale University Press, decided to import that tradition to our state, Indiana. Over time, we decided to expand on the repertoire and prepared texts of seven of Douglass’s addresses for public readings at any time of the year. Accompanying them are introductory PowerPoints and suggested discussion questions. We will use these speeches to explore the relevance of Douglass’s ideas to the problems our nation faces today. We have created this website to share these materials with any interested individual or organization.
