Impressed, the Massachusetts Antislavery Society (MAS) offered Frederick Douglass a job as a traveling speaker. Douglass then emerged as America’s newest Black exhibit. He was introduced to audiences as a “chattel,” a “thing,” a “piece of southern property,” before he shared the brutality of slavery. Though he understood the strategy of shocking White Americans into antislavery, Douglass grew to dislike the regular dehumanization. Whether enslaved or free, Black people were people. Although their enslavers tried, they had never been reduced to things. Their humanity had never been eliminated—a
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