Douglass

In the Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, Douglass himself exposes the grim life of an average slave. Their typical experiences were pretty dire and as time went on you would think things would get better and more respect would be shown for some of these older slaves, but that wasn't the case. It is stated in the narrative that Douglass was shipped from property to property multiple times to work on several different plantations and none of them were the least bit pleasant.

He was without a mother from a very young age and didn't even know about his birthdate. Douglass even likened his status in the household to the livestock. One of his masters even took away his privilege to read the Bible, because if he had done so he wouldn't be fit to be a slave. This is where I believe (and many others it seems) where Douglass developed the determination to learn all that he could and become a smart man.

A crossover I noticed between one of the facts in the movie we watched, and this narrative, was that Douglass described the singing of slaves as sorrowful, which is contradictory to the way blacks were depicted in popular culture during the early 20th century (singing with daffy glee).