A Date With History: Bear Me Into Freedom with Jeff McGuiness

Frederick Douglass was one of the most powerful and popular orators of the nineteenth century. An Old Testament prophet who was an enormously skilled speaker, Douglass traveled constantly in the United States and Great Britain advocating for abolition, emancipation, and civil rights in packed halls.
The fire for his advocacy was his Talbot County experience on Maryland’s Eastern Shore where he was born and suffered there enslaved for eleven years.
Douglass eloquently documented that experience in his three best-selling autobiographies that became the most powerful slave narrative in American literature. That narrative was the foundation of his heroic oratory.
Lance Morris and Jeff McGuiness bring Douglass’s Talbot years back to life with moving readings of Douglass’s Talbot narrative by Morris against stunning imagery by McGuiness of the places Douglass lived and struggled.
The presentation is based on McGuiness’s 284-page photographic essay, Bear Me Into Freedom: The Talbot County of Frederick Douglass, published by the St. Michaels Museum.