Philadelphia 8th graders meet Frederick Douglass’ great-great-grandson

Amora Williams–Edmunds, an eighth grader at Jenks Academy for the Arts and Sciences, squealed with delight when she ran up to her teacher, Katherine Muc, at the Lovett Memorial Library in East Mount Airy on Wednesday.

“I can’t believe it! We’re going to meet Frederick Douglass’ great-great-grandson,” the 13-year-old said.

Muc, an English teacher, kept the guest speaker’s identity a surprise for the 20 students she brought to the library from their Chestnut Hill school. They had just finished reading the first of Douglass’ three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

“And they loved it”, Muc said. The eighth graders were told they were going to the library to be Frederick Douglass “ambassadors” to celebrate Frederick Douglass Week, as part of Lovett Library’s tribute to Black History Month.

But she had not told them that Kevin Douglass Greene, a second-great-grandson of Douglass, would talk with them. Greene’s visit to Philadelphia was sponsored by Hands Across Philadelphia, an education advocacy organization.

The eighth graders were quiet and attentive as Greene began speaking. He is a tall, striking man with a gray beard, and looks remarkably like his great-great-grandfather.

In fact, when one student asked Greene whether he had inherited anything from Frederick Douglass, Greene smiled, then struck a profile pose and stood next to a painting of the 19th-century abolitionist.

» READ MORE: Philly ‘Walking Artist’ visits the gravesites of Tubman and Douglass — and finds allies along the way

Greene, 62, lives in Tennessee. But he has traveled and lived across the world, both as a child of an Army veteran and as a now-retired Army career man himself.

He told the Jenks students that his ancestor loved learning. He told them the white plantation owner told his wife to stop teaching Frederick how to read and write as a child because “it would ruin him for being a slave.”

He didn’t want Douglass to acquire knowledge, Greene said, “because knowledge is … what?”

“Power!” the students responded.

Greene said his great-great-grandfather lived in a household where conditions were better off than some of the poor white children’s homes. So, after Frederick’s formal lessons were stopped, he said: “He would take bread from the house and he would trade that bread for knowledge.”

Eventually, the young Frederick, whose original name was Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, was often “rented” out to work for other business owners. He went to Baltimore to work in a shipyard, and there he met a free Black woman, Anna Murray.

Murray, who was Greene’s great-great-grandmother, told Frederick that he was too accomplished to be enslaved.

She knew that with the proper clothing — he dressed as a sailor — and the fact that he could read and write, and understand train schedules, he could simply take a regular train to Philadelphia in 1838 and make his way to New York.

“He didn’t have to hide in a wagon or walk through the woods, like you hear with some of the people Harriet Tubman helped to escape,“ Greene said.

“That was the power of his knowledge. He could dress the part of a free man.”

Frederick Bailey would later change his name to Frederick Douglass and married Anna Murray after he escaped to New York.

Greene spoke to the students the day after what is celebrated as Douglass’ 205th birthdate. Douglass was born in February 1818 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He didn’t know his exact birthday, so he chose to celebrate it on Feb. 14.

Greene told the students he refers to his ancestor as being born “an enslaved” person rather than born “a slave.”

“A slave has no identity. A slave is just another piece of property of the owner,” he said. “Often on wills and census documents, you will see what the owners owned. And sometimes, under horses and pigs, you might see the letter S, for slave. The age might be posted and after that a value.

“But an enslaved person has a personality. They had a family. They had wants. They were sad. They were happy. An enslaved person had an identity.”

Greene was scheduled to give another talk to members of the public Wednesday night and the library was screening a PBS documentary, Frederick Douglass: When the Lion Wrote History, at 2:30 p.m. Thursday. The library is at 6945 Germantown Ave.

“It’s important that on your own, you learn as much as you can.”

The students also took time to meet with members of the Third Regiment Colored Troops Civil War reenactors. Albert El, the president of the regiment, told the students how Douglass often came to Philadelphia to work with other abolitionists and to recruit Black men to fight for the Union in the Civil War.

The Third Regiment was the first federally authorized troops, El said, and they trained at Camp William Penn, just outside Philadelphia in Cheltenham Township.

Lovett Memorial librarian Marsha Stender told the students that many people in the country are working to try to keep them from reading books about Frederick Douglass and other Black people who were a vital part of American history

“People are disagreeing about what you should be able to learn in school, about what is the truth,” Stender said. “So it’s important that on your own, you learn as much as you can.”

Williams-Edmunds said she was very excited to have met Greene. She called Frederick Douglass a hero.

And she said she found his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life, inspiring.

“There’s a lot we can learn from it, as long as we pay attention to what he’s saying,” she said.

“He teaches a lot of life lessons by sharing the pain of what he went through.”