Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Lesson Plan

Douglass describes himself as having never known his father and having barely known his mother. He seems to have turned out all right—but what do you think the effect of this might have been on the development of other young slaves? What do you imagine it must have been like to grow up without a mother or father in these conditions?

Students will probably have a variety of starting points for this—they may want to draw from personal experiences, for example, or from anecdotes about slavery that they've heard. What the teacher should emphasize, however, is that, for many slaves, slavery did not just entail losing precious things: it also meant never having those things...