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Toward the end of his life, Frederick Douglass served briefly as U.S. ambassador to Haiti. The disastrous episode reveals much about the country’s long struggle for Black sovereignty while always under the threat of U.S. empire.

In an 1860 speech commemorating radical abolitionist John Brown's raid on Harper’s Ferry, Frederick Douglass argued that slavery would only end if the slave owner feared the violent retribution of the enslaved.

John Harris’s The Last Slave Ships offers a comprehensive portrait of the illegal slave trade in the Atlantic, starting with the last slave ships to dock in New York Harbor.

The great abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass died 125 years ago. Today, Jacobin publishes never-before-transcribed articles from Frederick Douglass’ Paper denouncing capitalism and economic inequality.

"Moments come and moment pass. But you cannot freeze them if you do not seize them," is the theme of Gene Bruskin's musical exploration of Reconstruction when this nation had the chance to do the right thing. Like then, the moment is still now.

This is the perfect time to read the entirety of Frederick Douglass’s famous speech (from 1852), and not merely because of the date on the calendar.(Dave Zirin)

Less than a month before his death, when a young Black man solicited his advice to an African American just starting out in the world, Douglass replied without hesitation: "Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!"