© Licensed to London News Pictures. 28/05/2018. Bristol, UK. KWAME KWEI-ARMAH, Artistic Director of the Young Vic and former actor on Casualty, plays the part of Frederick Douglass at a commemorative event by the statue of poet and actor Alfred Fagon in St Pauls, Bristol. Frederick Douglass (Feb 1818– Feb 20 1895) who was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. In his time, he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave. Photo credit: Simon Chapman/LNP