Below is an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’ 1845 book, NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, about his slave mother.      That one excerpt    has more power to unmask the incredible, RELENTLESS, unrelenting, targeted    cruelty of American Slavery, than anything the films, 12 YEARS A SLAVE, or DJANGO UNCHAINED    or anything, angry, at her white mother, Nikole Hannah-Jones can conjure up.     There is a consensus that Frederick’s father was a white man; his name is lost to History.     Frederick Douglass was his nom de guerre; his official name was    Frederick Bailey. No one knows if Bailey was the name of his true white father, or the name of another white person, or a slave.     This Blogger does not know why he took a new surname. This Blogger assumes there was a Douglass who had been kind to him.     His real mother had died when he was young ( see excerpt),    and, as a slave,    he was given to one of those conflicted Southern slaveholding families in Maryland.     Con