Born into slavery in Maryland around 1818, Frederick Douglass was around twelve when his enslaver's wife began teaching him the alphabet, until her husband found out and forbade it, warning that teaching an enslaved person to read would make him unfit to be a slave — a warning Douglass later said only convinced him more firmly of exactly how valuable reading must be.
He continued learning in secret, trading bread with poor white children in his neighborhood in exchange for reading lessons, and practicing by copying letters wherever he could find them, understanding literacy as the one form of power that could not be easily taken back once gained.
In 1838, at twenty, he escaped slavery by posing as a sailor and traveling by train and boat to freedom in New York, later becoming one of the most powerful public speakers of the American abolitionist movement, drawing on both his own testimony and his self-taught command of language.
He went on to publish his own newspaper, advise President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, and write an autobiography detailing his life under slavery that became one of the most influential firsthand accounts of the era, all built on reading skills he had taught himself in defiance of an explicit order forbidding it.