A 19-minute documentary on the life of Frederick Douglass (c. 1818–1895), produced for the National Park Service by the pioneering filmmaker William Greaves. Using historic images and dramatized scenes, it follows Douglass from his birth in slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore — and the moment he grasped that literacy was “a key to freedom” — through his defiance of the slave-breaker Covey, his escape north, and his rise as the era’s greatest orator and abolitionist. Along the way it touches his newspaper The North Star, his ties to Harriet Tubman and John Brown, and his recruitment of Black soldiers during the Civil War. For the readers of Black Boys In Crisis, Douglass embodies self-education, courage, and the power of the written and spoken word.