Frederick Douglass in Rochester, The Newspaper Built on a Border Town

Frederick Douglass chose Rochester deliberately. He arrived in eighteen forty-seven, and within weeks of settling in he had founded a newspaper. He knew what he was building and why he was building it here.

Rochester sat on the Erie Canal, connected to every town along the three-hundred-sixty-three-mile corridor from Buffalo to Albany. It was close to the Canadian border, the one crossing point where freedom-seekers could move beyond the reach of the Fugitive Slave Act. It had a strong Quaker community, a well-established Underground Railroad network, and a free Black population organized enough to sustain a newspaper readership. It was far enough north that a Black man could edit an abolitionist paper without facing the mob violence that had destroyed Elijah Lovejoy's press in Alton, Illinois.

The paper's first issue appeared on December third, eighteen forty-seven. He called it the North Star. Its motto, printed on every front page, read: "Right is of no Sex, Truth is of no Color, God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren." He published it under various names for sixteen years, the longest single stretch of Black journalism in America up to that point.

The following year, in July of eighteen forty-eight, Douglass walked into the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Seneca Falls and delivered the speech that saved the women's suffrage resolution at the first women's rights convention in American history. He was the only Black man among the thirty-two men who signed the Declaration of Sentiments.

He was simultaneously the most famous Black man in America and a man who could still be legally returned to slavery under the laws of the country where he lived. Rochester was the city that made the work possible.