Frederick Douglass at West Chester

On February first, eighteen ninety-five, Frederick Douglass walked to a platform on the West Chester University campus and delivered his final public address. The speech was called Against Lynch Law, and it was vintage Douglass: a thundering condemnation of the racial terror that was sweeping the American South, a demand for justice, and a call to every American to live up to the founding promise of equality. Douglass had visited West Chester many times over the decades, drawn by the area's active abolitionist community.

He died less than three weeks later at his home in Washington, at the age of seventy-seven. That this campus was the setting for his last public words is not coincidence. Douglass chose his audiences deliberately, and Chester County was, to him, a place that had earned the right to hear him one final time.