The son of an enslaved woman and an unknown white man, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born into slavery in 1818 on Maryland's eastern shore. He was enslaved for twenty years in city households in Baltimore and on Maryland farms. In 1838, he fled north and changed his name to Frederick Douglass.



Douglass was highly active in the abolitionist movement and became one of its greatest leaders. He gave numerous speeches about his life as an enslaved man and the enormity of the institution. He also published his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave in 1845, which further bolstered anti-slavery efforts. During the Civil War he met with President Abraham Lincoln and encouraged African American men to take their freedom by fighting for the Union army.

Douglass was a revered African American leader. In 1874 he arrived in Lafayette Square as the newly appointed president of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, a bank chartered by Congress in 1865 to safeguard the savings of African American Civil War veterans and former slaves. When Douglass saw the Freedman's Bank building for the first time, he compared the experience to the way the Queen of Sheba, an African queen, felt upon seeing the riches of King Solomon. Douglass wrote, "The whole thing was beautiful. . . I felt like the Queen of Sheba when she saw the riches of Solomon, that 'half had not been told me'."