Anna Murray-Douglass
On this date, we celebrate the birth of Anna Murray Douglass, a Black abolitionist born in 1813.
Anna Murray was from near Denton in eastern Maryland and was the first person in her family to be born free. At 17, she came to Baltimore, where she met and married Frederick Douglass (then Frederick Bailey). They married after he escaped from slavery in 1838.
Murray-Douglass was an abolitionist in her own right. In the 1840s, she vigorously participated in the circle of the Massachusetts reformers, which included Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison.
Murray-Douglass met weekly with anti-slavery women who mounted the annual Ant-Slavery Fair in Boston’s Faneuil Hall. In 1847, she and her family moved to Rochester, New York, where she continued her abolitionist activities while raising a family, often alone because of her husband's travels abroad.
Murray-Douglass worked as a laundress and shoe binder to support her family. In the words of one of her daughters, Frederick Douglass's heroism “was a story made possible by the unswerving loyalty of Anna Murray.”
In 1872, Anna Douglass, her husband, and her family moved to Washington, D.C., where she lived until she died in 1882.
Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia
Volumes 1 and 2, edited by Darlene Clark Hine
Copyright 1993, Carlson Publishing Inc., Brooklyn, New York
ISBN 0-926019-61-9
