The North Star, Frederick Douglass in Rochester

On the third of December, eighteen forty-seven, a formerly enslaved man who had escaped from a Maryland plantation a decade earlier sat down in the Talman Building in downtown Rochester and published the first edition of a newspaper he called The North Star. Its masthead carried a motto: Right is of no sex, Truth is of no color, God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren.

Frederick Douglass had chosen Rochester deliberately. It sat near the Canadian border, close to the Underground Railroad routes that carried people to freedom. Its Quaker and abolitionist community was sympathetic. And its bustling commercial life meant a newspaper printed there could reach subscribers across the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean, and eventually did, to more than four thousand of them.

Douglass edited The North Star from Rochester for the better part of two decades, changing its name in eighteen fifty-one to Frederick Douglass' Paper after merging with a Gerrit Smith publication. He wrote, argued, raised money, and sheltered freedom seekers in his home. His house on South Avenue burned in eighteen seventy-two, a loss he attributed to arson, though that was never proven, and he moved to Washington not long after.

He never forgot Rochester. When he died in eighteen ninety-five, his body was brought back and buried at Mount Hope Cemetery, where Susan B. Anthony, his neighbor, his fellow reformer, his complicated friend across the long argument about which rights came first, would be buried eleven years later. They rest within sight of each other on a hillside above the Genesee valley, two of the most consequential people ever to call this city home.