Question

Toward the end of his slave autobiography, Frederick Douglass describes asking a white abolitionist friend in New Bedford named Johnson picking a new last name for him, a moment that dramatizes Douglass's insistence that we can invent our own identity. Where does Mr Johnson get the last name "Douglass"?

Answer 1

While enslaved, he was named Frederick Augustus Bailey. Douglass had changed his last name to Johnson when he went to New York City but in New Bedford, there were already a number of people with the same name.