The Frederick Douglass Museum and Caring Hall of Fame is located in the heart of Capitol Hill. The museum was the first Washington, DC, home of the famed statesman and abolitionist Frederick Douglass who moved to the District in the mid-1870s and occupied the town house at 316 A Street, NE for over seven years.

Today, the historic property has been restored to its original splendor and reopened as a tribute to caring past and present. It is now home to exhibits honoring its former occupant and the very special people of his spirit who have received a Caring Award. This honor is given each year to the world’s most caring adults and young adults. Like Douglass, they’re committed to doing the right thing on behalf of justice, equality, and human rights.

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in February 1818 to a slave woman in Talbot County, Maryland. As a boy, he realized the importance of education, especially after his master forbade the reading lessons that a kindly mistress had begun to give him. He later obtained a copy of The Columbian Orator and secretly taught himself to read and write.

In 1836, he was hired out as a caulker to a Baltimore shipbuilder. While in Charm City, he met many free blacks, including Anna Murray, whom he married in 1838. That was the year he fled Baltimore to escape slavery, briefly passing through New York. After settling in Bedford, Massachusetts, he changed his surname to Douglass, taken from Sir Walter Scott’s poem, “Lady of the Lake.”

Between 1841 and 1847 Douglass became prominent in the abolitionist movement. His friendship with the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison inspired him to become an anti-slavery lecturer and speak throughout the eastern and Midwestern states. In 1845, he published his memoirs, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. Once his identity was out, the slave hunters were on his trail, leading Douglass to flee once again.

This time, it was to England, where some British friends purchased his freedom in 1846, letting Douglass go home to Massachusetts as a free man and well-known public figure. In 1847, he settled in Rochester, New York, and began publishing the abolitionist weekly North Star, later renamed Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Nine years later, he published the second of his autobiographical works, My Bondage and My Freedom.

Douglass moved to Washington, DC, in 1871 and purchased his home on Capitol Hill. Seven years later he moved to Cedar Hill in the Anacostia section of the District, breaking a "whites only" covenant.

He became U.S. Marshal of the District of Columbia in 1877and its Recorder of Deeds in 1881. The following year Anna Murray died and Douglass published his last autobiographical book, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. In 1884 he married his long-time friend Helen Pitts, a white feminist from New York, but the comforts of married life didn’t make him complacent.