Douglass Statue Unveiled in Belfast
Exciting news! A few weeks ago, the first Frederick Douglass statue in Europe was unveiled in Belfast’s Rosemary Street. This is a very fitting location as it is right in the vicinity of sites where Douglass spoke during his visits to the city. This statue was created by Alan Beattie Herriot and Hector Guest!
Frederick Douglass journeyed to Ireland in 1845-46 as part of a two-year speaking tour, giving powerful speeches denouncing slavery and raising funds for the abolitionist cause in the United States. He found a warm welcome as he traveled throughout the island, delivering lectures to enthusiastic crowds in Dublin, Cork, Wexford, Waterford, Youghal, Limerick and Belfast. Invited by the Belfast Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass gave 11 lectures in Belfast and returned to the city several times. In a letter to fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison sent on 1st January 1846 from the Victoria Hotel (now the site of the Ulster University campus) in Belfast, Douglass wrote, “I can truly say, I have spent some of the happiest moments of my life since landing in this country. I seem to have undergone a transformation. I live a new life.”
Douglass was just 27 years old when he travelled abroad, and had escaped enslavement in Maryland only seven years earlier. He described his time in Ireland as key to the development of his political thinking. Douglass returned home to America in 1847 and settled in Rochester, where he published his famous The North Star newspaper, raised his children and conducted a stop on the Underground Railroad with his wife Anna Murray Douglass, and continued an extraordinary career as a writer, orator, suffragist, diplomat and advisor to at least three US Presidents, including President Abraham Lincoln. Douglass is considered one of the founders of the civil rights movement in America and has inspired such prominent figures as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., US Congressman John Lewis, US Secretary of State and Queen's University Chancellor Hillary Clinton and US Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Our friends from Anti-Slavery Tours Belfast attended the unveiling, and we are grateful for their photos of the event and reports!