ROCHESTER, N.Y. — New memorials will soon mark the graves of the first wife and daughter of abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
His wife, Anna Murray Douglass, and daughter, Annie Douglass, both have plots at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, but currently share a memorial with the abolitionist.
The Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives received $15,000 in grants from the Community Foundation to give the two their own memorials.
According to the FDFI, Anna Murray lived in Rochester and raised five children in the city. She had helped Frederick escape slavery in Maryland and also ran a stop on the Underground Railroad. They were married from 1838 until Anna's death in 1882.
Annie Douglass was born in Rochester and was a "devoted student of the abolitionist movement," according to the FDFI. She died in 1860 at age 10 of a brain hemorrhage.
“This honor for my great-great grandmother and her daughter is long overdue,” Nettie Washington Douglass, co-founder and co-chair of Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives said in a statement. “We are absolutely thrilled that the Rochester community and visitors from around the world will be able to recognize and pay appropriate respect to two of the most important women in Frederick Douglass’s life. This is about historical preservation of the truth and the commitment that the Douglass family had not only to the struggle for freedom and equality for all, but to each other and their entire family.”
And as part of Black History Month, the Douglass family is also working with the History Channel to distribute 1 million copies of Frederick Douglass' book to students across the country.