Toward the end of his slave autobiography, Frederick Douglass describes asking a white abolitionist friend in New Bedford named
Johnson picking a new last name for him, a moment that dramatizes Douglass's insistence that we can invent our own identity. Where does Mr Johnson get the last name "Douglass"?
While enslaved, he was named Frederick Augustus Bailey. Douglass had changed his last name to Johnson when he went to New York City but in New Bedford, there were already a number of people with the same name.
