NEW YORK— Adjoa Aboagye, 40, learned about Frederick Douglass – the former slave turned abolitionist leader – in high school. But an event at her first National Action Network convention gave her richer insight into what his legacy means today, 400 years after the first slaves were brought to America.
“It reminded me to be more nuanced about historical figures,” she said.
Aboagye attended a session at the 28th annual National Action Network convention entitled “Four Hundred Years Later: Understanding Slavery and Freedom Through the Eyes of Frederick Douglass.” The event drew a crowd of more than 300 people to the East Ballroom at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel on Wednesday afternoon.
There, Rev. Al Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, held a conversation with Yale University historian Dr. David Blight and Georgetown sociologist Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, followed by a book signing with the two authors. The discussion focused on Douglass’s reflections toward the end of his life and what those years can teach a community divided under the Trump administration.
Even in the time of Frederick Douglass, “there were always fights with different segments of the movement,” Sharpton said. 
Last year, Blight published Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, a biography born out of a private archival collection in Savannah, Georgia containing ten of Douglass’s family scrapbooks.
“No one helped explain, had more to say, represented the interior psychological and exterior physical experience of slavery could do to the human being and the human body like Frederick Douglass,” Blight said.
