The most Prolific and Highly Regarded Frederick Douglass Presenter to Attend

Frederick Douglass / aka Michael Crutcher Sr.,
will speak on Abolition and Human Rights at
2:30-3:30 Saturday at Pavilion 1, and
at 11:00-11:45 Sunday at Pavilion 1.

Frederick Douglass – “A fugitive slave who rose from bondage to become a foremost orator, writer, abolitionist, and the most influential black leader of the mid-nineteenth century. Douglass was instrumental in convincing President Lincoln and the U.S. Army to raise regiments of former slaves and free northern blacks to help fight the war and liberate their enslaved brethren in the South.” Douglass was a Martin Luther King Jr. type of that time! A well-known Frederick Douglass message to us today: “Without a struggle, there can be no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”

“Michael Crutcher Sr. is perhaps the most prolific and highly regarded Frederick Douglass presenter in the world!”

“His greatest honor to date was representing Douglass at the request of Frederick’s descendant family at the unveiling of the new Frederick Douglass statue in Emancipation Hall at the Nation’s Capital in Washington, DX, on June 19, 2013.”

He has been in several television commercials and training videos and was a stand-in actor in the movie Seabiscuit and can be seen in the movie Dreamer, with actors Dakota Fanning and Kurt Russell Douglass’ statue is the first to represent the District of Columbia and the third of an African-American at the Capitol. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks from the modern civil rights era also have statues, as do abolitionist Sojourner Truth

In early 1863 Brigadier General Lorenzo Thomas Sr. was sent to the Mississippi Valley by the Honorable Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War to organize self-emancipated “slaves” into regiments of United States civil war troops. On April 12th while at Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana headquarters of General Grant, he was satisfied that 20,000 troops alone, could be organized on the west bank of the Mississippi in answer to Douglass’s Call to Arms at the time.

”Freedom to the slave should now be proclaimed from the Capitol, and should be seen above the smoke and fire of every battle field, waving from every loyal flag.”—Frederick Douglass, 1861

SELF-EMANCIPATION ABOUNDED IN THE MISSISSIPPI “RIBBER” VALLEY IN FREEDOM SUMMERE 1863 AS EX-SLAVES SOLDIERS FOUGHT FOR FREEDOM’S GLORY ON THE BAYOUS

In April U. S. Colored Troops fought Confederate Armies at Pascagoula Mississippi and won. In May they lost in battle at Port Hudson near Baton Rouge, while proving they could and would fight their “masters.” In June they won in battles of Fort Butler in Donaldsonville and Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana. On July 4, they won in battle at Helena Arkansas. These battles were for Union control of Mississippi River and victory at Vicksburg.

In Freedom Summer 1863, Vicksburg fell to the Union Army on July 4th, four days later Confederates at Port Hudson surrendered. Then thousands upon thousands of enslaved African Descendants self-emancipated (runaways) “in ways that showed once and for all they were not content to be held in bondage.”

Up and down the Mississippi River and her tributaries, thousands of able-bodied African Descent males joined and were recruited into the Union military as freedom fighting soldiers, sailors and cavalrymen. Thousands of other African Descent men, women and children served the cause for freedom as spies, scouts, nurses, cooks, laundresses, servants, teamsters, stevedores, foragers, wood choppers, general laborers, field hands, blacksmiths and builders of forts, breastworks and roads.