One Million Abolitionists (United States)
A Conversation with Kenneth Morris Jr., Descendant of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington
Frederick Douglass in his later years. (Credit: New York Public Library Digital Collections.)
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From October 18, 2025, to January 3, 2027, the Museum of the American Revolution based in Philadelphia will feature “The Declaration’s Journey,” a comprehensive exhibition that will trace the journey of the Declaration of Independence from its numerous drafts written by Thomas Jefferson (accompanied by 14-year-old slave Robert Hemmings), with the input of Benjamin Franklin and John Adams at the Graff House (7th and Market Street, Philadelphia) to its ratification during the Second Continental Congress at the Pennsylvania State House (Independence Hall).
Throughout the Museum of the American Revolution’s exhibition, the final document and every subsequent document and country influenced by these works will be highlighted. This exhibition will also be made available online and will include a first draft of Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech on loan from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
Due to this exhibition, I was given the opportunity to speak with Mr. Kenneth B. Morris Jr., co-founder and president of the nonprofit Frederick Douglass Family Initiative (FDFI). He is also the great-great-great-grandson of Frederick Douglass and the great-great-grandson of Booker T. Washington. Both Douglass and Washington are Black Americans whose lives, sacrifices, and accomplishments serve as part of the discourse and events leading up to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, American Civil War, and the Reconstruction Period. As encompassing and compelling as these topics are, we will not be focusing on them, but on these two men’s legacies and influences on their descendants.
James Earl Jones reads “What Is A Slave Is 4th of July?” (Credit: Democracy Now!)
Interview with Mr. Kenneth B. Morris Jr.
Thibert: You were quoted as saying the upcoming “The Declarations Journey” will help more Americans understand the diverse people and viewpoints that contributed to our founding and to where we are today as a nation. Can you share your thoughts on why the words of Fredrick Douglass still resonate so long after his passing?
Morris: I’ll start with his words that unfortunately still resonate all these years after his passing. What I mean by that is that we’re still dealing with the same struggles and challenges that he faced. While there has been some incremental progress in this country, Fredrick Douglass said, “Without struggle, there is no progress,” so we’re still in the midst of a mighty struggle. He wrote three best-selling autobiographies. He also wrote a fictional novella that a lot of people don’t know about called Heroic Slave. Of course, he published The North Star newspaper to which he contributed thousands of articles and essays.
He’s given us a lot of words to grapple and reckon with, so I truly believe that he was an important historical and consequential figure in the United States. I consider him one of the Founding Fathers of the Second Republic after the Civil War and that’s why he still speaks to us today. I’m thankful that his words and message still resonate because we need them more than ever.
Thibert: Your biography states that “until the year 2007, his [your] life could be described as distinguished yet decisively disengaged from his lineage until Providence called.” Can you describe your life until Providence intervened and what exactly was this life-altering moment?
Morris: I’ve worn a lot of hats and had a few careers before starting our nonprofit organization, the FDFI, in 2007. My first career was as a singer with Howard Hewett. From there, I gravitated towards being an entrepreneur and started my own advertisement/marketing company with a partner who, at the time, was the former president of Bally’s Casino Resort in Las Vegas. We started a company that catered to the travel industry, and we developed convention programs, incentive programs, and meetings for our clients, which included Royal Caribbean, Celebrity Cruise Lines, which was our biggest client. At that time, I was happy to be a business owner, the father of two daughters, and married—for 41 years.
Thibert: Congratulations.
Morris: Thank you. We were making money, life was good, we went to church on Sunday, and I was fine with all of that. Just don’t talk to me about the legacies of Douglass and Washington. While I appreciated them and felt blessed to carry them forward, I was just not really involved with them, and there were many reasons for this situation. The primary reason was I saw what the pressure did to those who came before me, including my grandfather, Frederick Douglass III, who was Frederick Douglass’s grandson. He was the namesake of one of this country’s heroes.
My grandfather was a brilliant man and a surgeon. He was commissioned to the Tuskegee Institute during World War II, which is where he met my grandmother, Nettie Hancock Washington, who was Booker T. Washington’s granddaughter. They met, fell in love at first sight, and wound up getting married three months later. Then my mom, Nettie Washington Douglass (co-founder of FDFI) was born, which united the bloodlines of these two families.
My grandfather always walked around with the weight of others’ expectations on his shoulders, and people expected him to be an iconic leader like his great-grandfather. But there is only one Frederick Douglass and that weight became too much for him to carry. When my grandmother was three months pregnant with my mom, he took his life. My mother was raised without her father, and when I came along with my younger brother and sister, our mother put a wall of protection around us. This was to shield us from these two formidable legacies. I’m thankful that she did that because I didn’t feel the pressure growing up and that was one of the things that contributed to not really being connected to these legacies.
I was appreciative of them, but I just wasn’t connected to them. Then when I was young and told people about my heritage—no one ever believed me. You can imagine being a kid and people not believing you, including teachers. You just don’t want to talk about it. It was something that actually embarrassed me.
But that changed in 2005 after I read a National Geographic magazine. The cover story title was “21st Century Slaves.” Actually, the article was from 2003, but I didn’t read it until 2005. That article just floored me. It was about modern-day slavery and human trafficking. Sex trafficking and labor trafficking exist around the world, and I had heard about them, but up until that point, I really thought about them happening in far-off places like Southeast Asia and not here in the United States. I wanted to know more about this issue and started reading everything I could find.
Google searches and finding what I could culminated on one evening that changed my whole life. I was sitting in the living room of our home. Down the hallway, my daughters were getting ready for bed and, at that time, they were 12 and 9 years old. While I was reading another article about a 12-year-old girl who was forced to be a sex slave in brothels in Southeast Asia, I could hear my daughters getting ready for bed. They were laughing and playing and just about to get on their knees and say their prayers.
My mind just started racing, and I couldn’t grasp what I was reading and what I heard down the hallway. I remember thinking to myself that this is what young boys and girls should be doing: getting tucked safely into bed. They should not be forced into servicing some sick individual. When I went in to say goodnight to my daughters, I couldn’t look them in the eyes. I just started feeling guilty that I had this platform that my ancestors had built through sacrifice, and perhaps we could leverage the historical significance of my ancestry to do something about these issues.
Right around that time, I was also looking to give back. I felt that, as a family and personally, I had been so blessed with my career and with a beautiful family and great life, but I was starting to feel a little unfulfilled. I was in my 40s looking for something, and that’s what it was, so my mom and I started talking about putting together a nonprofit organization. For many years, she had been carrying the torch and talking about the family since her first public appearance as not yet a two-year-old. She attended the groundbreaking ceremony at the Booker T. Washington National Monument in Virginia.
Some family and friends encouraged her to start an organization, but it just wasn’t her thing. She didn’t want to start or run an organization. She just enjoyed going into schools and talking to students, but when I approached her with the idea, she finally decided that it would be great. Starting our organization took us a little over a year to get our 501c tax status from the IRS. I think we officially started in early 2008 so that’s what changed my life.
Booker T. Washington (front row, center left), with Andrew Carnegie and other sponsors of Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, 1903 (Photo Credit: Unknown)
Thibert: Slavery is a very dark topic that most people feel uncomfortable about discussing or confronting it. How do you and other members of the FDFI stay positive while addressing this topic?
Morris: I’ve seen a lot of organizations come and go. We’ve been doing this now for almost 17 years. It’s very easy to get discouraged and to get burnt out doing this work. The difference between what we do and what other organizations do is that most of these organizations are out there doing very good work. They are working on the back end to rescue, restore, and rehabilitate the victims and survivors of trafficking and that’s priority No. 1.
We need to do that, but we also looked at the original Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) first enacted in 2000 with reauthorization every four years. It really just guides how the federal government responds to trafficking domestically and internationally. I always felt like that the legislation was flawed because it only addressed what happens after the victimization occurs. Law enforcement comes in and arrests, prosecutes, and hopefully sends the perpetrators to jail.
Many organizations come in to rescue, restore, and rehabilitate, but when children have been traumatized in the way traffickers traumatize people, it’s very hard to offer those victims and survivors some semblance of wholeness, and so we thought, well, let’s look at the TVPA.
I contacted Chris Smith, a Republican representative from New Jersey. He’s a good guy and a Frederick Douglass fan. I went to him when the TVPA was being reauthorized in 2018. I asked him if he would consider renaming it after Frederick Douglass because that year was his bicentennial. Rep. Smith agreed to do that. Then, I asked if we could help write the primarily prevention language into the legislation because, as I said before, that now the language was just completely reactionary. There was secondary and tertiary prevention language in there, but nothing primary trying to prevent the victimization from happening. So, he agreed and we wrote primary prevention language into that legislation and it passed through the House and the Senate with the name changed. We also added “prevention” to the name, so now it’s called the Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Act. Just by adding that word to the name and the language, money was appropriated through the Department of Health and Human Services. I think it was around $78 million, and that money went out in grants to organizations that were doing primary prevention education, which included our organization, and we were the beneficiaries of some of that money.
Working on the front end of this issue with students, we spend all of our time with K–12 schools trying to reduce the vulnerabilities of young people being trafficked for sex and labor. Working on education at the front end is a much more positive experience than working with victims after they have been victimized. You are right that it is a very heavy subject that a lot of people to this day want to bury their heads in the sand and act like it doesn’t exist because it’s just too hard to confront how human beings can exploit men, women, and mostly children in the way that trafficking exploits people.
Thibert: Is the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act of 2023 (HR55856) enough to assist in the reduction of slavery, sex trafficking, and labor trafficking? If it is not, what is the act lacking?
Morris: Over the past couple of years, I would have to look back at the dates, but you can probably search and track the legislation because it did pass through the most recent authorization in the House. But then when it went to the Senate, it got stuck in a committee, and I don’t remember which committee it was. It got stuck because there were senators who wanted to break up the legislation. It was in four different pieces, and it never passed through the Senate. Now that we have a new administration, it’s going to go back to the House. I don’t know if it has been reintroduced yet, but, hopefully, we can get it passed this time because the main senator who was holding it up is no longer in the Senate. I believe Bob Menendez (Democrat from New Jersey) was holding it up.
*Side note: Senator Bob Menendez is currently serving a 11-year sentence for corruption at a federal prison in Pennsylvania.
What does it lack? I think it is a really strong piece of legislation because it provides money for not only the restoration and rehabilitation of victims but also their reintegration into society and the workforce. It also expands the primary education prevention language in the legislation. To answer your question, I’m pleased overall with the legislation. I have not read it this year, so I would have to revisit it to see if anything jumps out that can be improved on, but the main thing is getting it passed. People need to follow up with their Congressional representatives and just demand that they bring it to the House floor for a vote, and then when it goes to the Senate to do the same thing.
Thibert: What does a modern abolitionist look like?
Morris: Abolitionists, as far as we’re concerned, are young people, and the reason that I say that is because when we first started doing our work, my mom and I really didn’t have a business plan. We just knew we needed to be in schools. Initially in 2008, we did a program called “Frederick Douglass Dialogs” and the idea was to visit 30 schools in 30 days. We started reaching out to schools that were named after Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington because we figured that they wouldn’t turn us away (laughs).
We hoped that they would allow us to talk about this very difficult subject as, at that time, there were organizations trying to get into schools to talk about prevention, but it was very difficult for them because of the subject matter. You know you’re going to get pushback from school administrators, superintendents, and principals. Due to our unique connection to history, however, we were able to get into those schools named after Douglass and Washington and then several others because what we were doing was starting with historic slavery and talking about the great freedom fighters and abolitionists who came before us, including my ancestors and many others, and really helping students and teachers understand what historic slavery looked like.
Then it was a natural transition for us to ask them to look through the prism of history at contemporary forms of human rights abuses, modern-day slavery, and human trafficking. We had those conversations on our first tour. We ended up visiting 45 schools in 30 days. I was exhausted. We made four presentations on some days, but because of the way we came in with that connection with history, we were able to wrap them up within the context of historical slavery. That tended to soften some of what I would call the prickly edges of a very difficult subject. That allowed us to really be a leader in primary prevention and education and expand from there.
Then we thought: There is only one me and only one mom. How can we institutionalize what we are doing and get into more schools? We created a curriculum called “History of Human Rights and the Power of One.” The phrase “The Power of One” actually came from students because they started to say to us, “Now that you’re talking about historic slavery and modern slavery, how can we be modern-day abolitionists? How can we be like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, or Harriet Tubman?” That came from the students, so we incorporated it into the curriculum’s civic engagement or service learning. We realized that there were teachers, mostly in high school seniors, who were looking for innovative services learning projects because their students had to have a certain number of volunteer hours in the community before they could graduate. Our curriculum fit in really nicely as a very interesting project for teachers to work on. We made it available on our website for teachers to download for free. As it was more like Slavery 101, the teachers didn’t need training to actually deliver our curriculum in the classrooms. Soon, we saw right away we were included in hundreds of school curriculums.
In 2012, New York Mayor Bloomberg came to us and asked us to deliver a program for New York schools. We started working with the NYC Department of Education, and they wanted us to dive in much deeper into the subject matter and what we were doing with our “History of Human Rights and the Power of One” curriculum. After we started to dive into it, we realized we could not give this to teachers unless they were trained and so we started doing some trainings. I think we did two or three trainings for 50 teachers at a time.
Then Mayor Bloomberg left office and DiBlasio came in, and he was not interested in continuing what we were doing. But we were able to take that model online as our “PROTECT Program,” which we launched in partnership with two California-based nonprofits. One is called Love Never Fails. The other is 3Stands Global that is online training of educators and anybody who comes in contact with kids in schools or in the community. The training is specifically for teachers who can be certified. They are able to download and teach an age-appropriate curriculum in the classroom and this is education K through 12. We are starting very early, and all of the curriculum is age-appropriate.
We got a grant from a rural foundation in California, and they wanted us to deliver education to the 30-plus rural counties in California. Once we had that mandate, we realized that our in-person training would not work anymore. My great-great-great grandchildren, 150 years from now, would still be trying to reach the numbers of students and teachers the foundation wanted us to reach through that first grant. I’m really proud of our “PROTECT Program.” I believe that it is the most comprehensive human-trafficking prevention education that exists anywhere.
(Photo credit: Hermes Rivera)
Thibert: Can you tell me more about the curriculum offered under “PROTECT” (with 3Stands Global and Love Never Fails) and the four components to prevention and the early intervention program? What exactly will young people be interacting with?
Morris: The “PROTECT Program” is just for adults and mostly for teachers, as it’s the teachers who are responsible for getting trained and then implementing the lessons in the classroom. As I mentioned, it’s age appropriate, so when we are in an elementary school, we are not talking about sex trafficking or labor trafficking as that subject matter would be too deep for them. Instead, we talk about “What is a human life worth?” The students start to look at historical figures so that they can see themselves in Dolores Huerta or Frederick Douglass or Cesar Chavez. We have a lot of different models so that students can see themselves in them, and then decide who they let into their circle of friends and how can they trust their inner voice. That’s the kind of conversation that we have at the elementary level, then when they start to get older and into middle school they can be introduced to what labor trafficking and sex trafficking are.
Many times, our curriculum lines up with what the students are already learning in school. Because teachers are overburdened with what they have to do, we developed the program to fit into the arc of the narrative of what is being taught for the year. It gradually becomes a supplement or another resource that they can use to plug into what they are already bringing to the classroom. By the time they get to high school, they are getting the full-blown curriculum information and that’s when the service component kicks in. We’ve had students do all kinds of service projects. For example, students have spoken at the UN. Other students have trained with law enforcement in their community on how to recognize victims of human trafficking. When they see girls who have been prostituted, they understand that they are victims who have been forced for the most part. No child can make a decision to sell themselves into sex trafficking, so when underage girls and boys are involved, that’s considered human trafficking.
Other service projects include being on radio shows, using art exhibits to show what trafficking looks like through photography, painting, and music. The sky is the limit on what the students can actually do, and the service component is the most important piece because it gets inside of them. We have been doing this long enough that I’ve met students who are now grown adults who I met years ago when they were in middle school, and the impact on their learning was not only getting the human trafficking education but also learning about Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, Anna Marie Douglass, and my great-great-grandmother Olivia A. Davidson Washington. The projects are inspirational for students as well as informative.
Kenneth Morris Jr addressing a youth group (photo credit: https://www.kennethbmorrisjr.com)
Thibert: You are co-founder with Robert J. Benz, who developed the core philosophy of the preventive approach to human trafficking that led to the “PROTECT Program” and promoted changes to the TVPA.
What is FDFI’s core philosophy and how has it evolved since the nonprofit’s founding?
Morris: Robert did help us start the organization. He is no longer a part of it after an internal decision was made by our board of directors about four years ago. I don’t necessarily talk about him now in the same way I might have talked when we were working together in a positive light, just for your information on that.
You were asking about our core philosophy. Frederick Douglass is an example of leadership as an abolitionist and freedom fighter. Booker T. Washington is an example of leadership as an educator and founder of the Tuskegee Institute. Both of them were spokespersons for their people. When Douglass passed away, Washington took on the mantel of leadership. The way that I have always looked at their work is that they did it during very, very difficult times in the history of our country.
They both rose to levels that really were above all of the turmoil and conflict, particularly Douglass who was an advisor to President Lincoln during the Civil War. He had to rise above that, and I think their spirits are reflected in our work. I carry their DNA. Their blood flows through my veins, and so we are an apolitical organization. We want to make sure that we are not getting caught up in the fray of the craziness that we are facing in our country right now. We recognize that, speak to that, but our work really is about human rights.
I’ll give you an example. When Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery at the age of 20, he started speaking and joined up with William Lloyd Garrison, an abolitionist, and became a paid lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison said to him, “Frederick, tell your story.” Frederick would stand up and go to town to town, city to city, just telling his story.
At that time, what he was doing was important because he had suffered the inhumanity of slavery, escaped, and then communicated his experiences to an audience in a way no one before him ever could. He became a very, very important voice for the abolition of slavery and teaching people what really happened. The so-called benevolent institutions were those that were pro-slavery and like the federal government were trying to lie to the American people. These people would say things like “They are better off in slavery,” “They are not even human,” and “They listen to happy songs and are always singing.” They said everything to justify taking the freedom from a group of people and to treat them inhumanely and with brutality.
It is therefore really important that our model of the work that we are doing reflects the spirit of what my ancestors did. After Frederick had been speaking for a while, people doubted that he had been a slave. He didn’t look like what they thought a slave should look and sound like. They saw this well-dressed, good-looking, eloquent, funny, and charismatic man, and they started to call him a fraud. In order to prove that he was who he claimed to be, he wrote his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which was published initially in May 1845. When it was published, he had another problem. It became a best-seller, and that’s the last thing that he wanted was the notoriety of a best-selling book when he was trying to hide from his enslaver. He had to leave for Europe for a couple of years. He traveled to Scotland, England, and Ireland. He wound up spending four months in Ireland because it was the first time he felt like a man. He didn’t have slave catchers on his heels. He wasn’t being judged by the color of his skin. He just felt that it was a good place for him to be.
The other issue is that he arrived in Ireland during the Great Potato Famine, and he saw the sufferings of people who did not look like him. The importance of that experience was that after he arrived in Ireland, he was just thinking about the abolishment of slavery in his country and fighting for his people. But seeing the suffering in Ireland, he started to think with an internationalist mindset to fight for human rights for everyone.
He developed this mindset there and began to develop a different philosophy about the abolishment of slavery from Garrison. They began to split by that time. Douglass would eventually have his freedom purchased by his friends and supporters from Newcastle, so by the time he came back to the United States, he moved his family to Rochester, New York and began to publish The North Star newspaper. Garrison was not happy about this because he felt the new paper was in conflict with his paper, The Liberator.
I told you that story because of how Douglass was initially so focused on the abolishment of slavery, but when he saw the sufferings of other people, he started to focus more on human rights in general, and I think that is why about six months after he came back to the U.S., he went to Seneca Falls where he was the only man to speak at the women’s rights convention in 1848. He was one of 32 men who signed the Declaration of Sentiments because he understood that this was a human rights issue and there was many intersections connecting all the various issues. That’s how we focus on our work by thinking about the bigger picture. That’s why we call our umbrella program the “History of Human Rights and The Power of One” and not the “History of Human Trafficking and The Power of One.”
That was a long answer.
Thibert: In Douglass’s first autobiography, he does not disclose how he escaped from slavery. I remember his words in which he states he did not want people to know how he escaped so that route was made unavailable for those coming behind him. He also makes reference to Box (Henry Brown) and the Kraft couple and how those avenues were now scrutinized after the book was publicized.
Morris: You are exactly right about his first autobiography, but his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, was published in 1855 still prior to the Civil War. It wasn’t until his third biography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, that he disclosed how he escaped because by that time the 13th Amendment had been ratified, and the Civil War was over, so it was safe for him to say that he escaped with the assistance of his future wife, Anna Marie Douglass.
Anna, my great-great-great grandmother, was the first person in her family to be born free. Her parents and brothers and sisters had been enslaved, but they were able to secure their freedom. She was born free and was a domestic servant in Baltimore. They were actually from neighboring counties on the eastern shore of Maryland, so there is some speculation by some historians that they might have met prior to Baltimore.
The way the story is told is that they met in Baltimore. We don’t know exactly how they met, but they obviously did. They started to care about each other. She was a couple of years older than he was, and she saw in this teenage boy all of his potential. As they started to think about a future together, she said, “Frederick, I don’t want our children’s father to be a slave” and “I don’t care that they told you are a slave for life.” She was one of the first people to plant some positive thoughts in his mind that he was not meant to be a slave for life, so they made a plan. It’s likely that she was already working in the Underground Railroad and helping people. That will be shown in a new Anna Maria Douglass biography that will come out in September 2026.
She sold her personal belongings to help pay for his escape. She put together the sailor’s disguise he wore. He dressed up as a sailor because he had worked on the ship docks as a caulker. He watched sailors coming in and going and he soon knew how to talk and walk like a sailor. Then they secured some forged identification papers of a sailor who didn’t even look like him. That’s what he used when he finally had the courage and the wherewithal to escape with her help. He escaped by boat rather by train. When he landed in New York City, he wrote a letter back to Anna. She joined him, and two weeks later, they got married and took on the names Frederick and Anna Johnson.
He was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey and changed his name to Johnson. The conductors on the Underground Railroad suggested that they resettle in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he could likely get work on the ship docks. They went to New Bedford two weeks later and stayed in the home of Nathan Holly Johnson. Johnson was reading Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Lady in the Lake,” and there was a character whose last name was Douglas. It was suggested that he take on that name and to make it unique by adding another “s”—thus they became Frederick and Anna Douglass. That’s their story of how they escaped, and it’s been a long-standing lament in our family that Anna has not been treated with the dignity and respect she deserves.
She has been pushed aside. She is not even really a footnote in the story, and that’s primarily because of how history is mainly told by male historians who write women like Anna out of history. The narrative is that this dark-skinned woman never learned to read or write, which is not true. We found research that proves she was not illiterate. That will come out in her biography, next year. We’ve been working very hard to lift up her story because I’m just as proud of her as I am of him.
They were married for 44 years and had 5 children and 21 grandchildren. She was a conductor on the Underground Railroad and helped to ferry hundreds of freedom seekers to their freedom through their home in Rochester to Canada when Frederick was out on the road. She was running the house, making sure the children were getting educated, all the while helping freedom seekers: feeding them, clothing them, and helping them get to their freedom in Canada. She was a radical freedom seeker in her own right. When she passed away in 1882 while in Washington D.C., about 3,000 people attended her funeral. In comparison, Harriet Tubman had approximately 2,000 people at her funeral and Sojourner Truth had 1,000. That anecdote lets you know her importance. She was a Queen.
People relied on her and needed her, but history has thus far excluded her from this story. We are working hard to change that narrative, and when her 750-page biography comes out next year, it will blow the roof off how she’s been treated. Male historians said, “She never wrote her story down” or “There is nothing there,” or “There is nothing to portray her other than being in the garden or the kitchen,” when the important work was being done. These comments couldn’t be further from the truth. She was right in the mix of all of it by leading this movement in the same way many women did throughout history, but she didn’t get the credit for what she put into it—until now.
Portrait of Mrs. Anna Murray Douglass (Photo Credit: Unknown)
Thibert: How many schools and states currently participate in the “History of Human Rights Program”?
Morris: I don’t know. That would be a question for 3Strands Global as they actually run the program for us now. They are the fiscal sponsor of the funding that comes in. We created the models from our New York City program. Then the other two nonprofits partnered and brought their intellectual property into this. They were doing some prevention, but mostly they were doing rescue and rehabilitation. I’m more of an advisor now, so I get updates quarterly. The numbers that I get are posted on our website. How many adults did we train? How many students were impacted or educated? That’s where we impact, so I don’t have any clue how many schools are in, but those numbers on the website are accurate as far as the numbers of the teachers that we’ve trained and the students we’ve educated.
Side note: According to both the 3Strands Global Foundation and Frederick Douglas Family Initiative website, over 1.0 million adults have been trained in the “PROTECT Prevention Education” curriculum, and 804,744-plus students have received the education. In 2024, the Telecommunications Against Trafficking and Exploitation (TATE) collaborative initiative with 3Strands was successful in expanding the prevention program to all 50 states.
Thibert: How is the FDFI funded? Do you receive any grants, federal funding, or major donations?
Morris: Yes. Our funding mostly comes from a mix of some corporations, the federal government, and mostly through the National Park Service, which runs the Frederick Douglass National Historic site in the Anacostia Neighborhood in Washington D.C. We’ve done some programs with students at the home. We haven’t really received federal funding outside of the National Park Service. Of the other funding, a significant amount comes from individual donations. We were up for an EPA grant, an environmental justice grant, that we were thought we were going to get to help us build a museum in Rochester, New York, dedicated to the Frederick and Anna Marie Douglass family. This was going to be a six-year project. This is a significant project, and we were in line to get an environmental justice grant to do our due diligence in environmental studies on the parcels we wanted to build the museum on. That was about a $350,000 grant that went away the day after Trump came into office.
Thibert: That was going to be my next question. Was any of your funding cut due to the new administration?
Morris: Our grant writer was working on this through Fordham University, and I was told that we were waiting on one signature that we were hoping to get before January 20. We didn’t get it. I believe it was January 21 when we got word that the funding was no longer available, and I guess he cut all the EPA monies that were out there. We were definitely impacted. We didn’t have the money that would have helped us with pre-development of the museum. Now we are scrambling to try and find money to pay for the environmental studies that need to be done, and we have a company doing our audience research. All of these things are the information that we are going to need when we start a capital campaign. That is going to cost money because people when they want to write a check, they are going to want to know how many visitors to expect, what the programming looks like, what the operations are like, and all that stuff. That’s where we are right now.
Thibert: Do schools in low-income neighborhoods, charter schools, and all other schools have access to these programs? What exactly is the protocol to enroll in this program?
Morris: It’s a mixture of all of that. Of course, we want to be in schools that are in underserved communities because that is where students are really vulnerable to being trafficked by these predators. It is not really a cookie- cutter program. We will go into communities, and one of the first things we’ll do is an assessment on work that is already being done against trafficking organizations. What work are they doing? Is law enforcement communicating with the organization? What child protective services are available? What education is provided? Typically, there is a disconnect in these communities between law enforcement, education, and all of the stakeholders who need to be prepared to provide a safety net. When a disclosure happens after a student hears something and thinks they’re in trouble, or somebody that they know is in trouble and they disclose that to a teacher, counselor, or a nurse, that person needs to know how to respond. We do an initial assessment and develop a response protocol so that everybody in the community is coordinated and a safety net is provided when disclosures happen—because they will happen.
It’s not one size fits all. There are some schools that want us to deliver services to certain grades. Other school districts want to make sure that we’re getting to K–12 students. When they enter elementary school, they are getting full training throughout their educational career. It just really depends on their needs. The other thing that changes is the percentage of what we’re teaching about labor trafficking versus sex trafficking. If we are in an inner city or urban area, the percentage of sex trafficking might be higher than labor trafficking. But when we go down to San Diego close to the Mexican border where labor trafficking is more prevalent, then the percentage of what is delivered is skewed towards labor trafficking. It really depends on the needs of the school and the districts and what they are looking to accomplish.
I know we are in Utah and Texas in a big way. I believe we are in 10 states in total. We have had some interest in expanding the program internationally as well.
Children at the US/Mexico border (Photo Credit: PBS News)
Thibert: Children being brought over the Southern border and used for labor and sex has been an overlooked issue. Has the FDFI been able to assist in any way?
Morris: In our program, we have drawn a circle around schools because that’s where we can reach teachers who are passionate about protecting our kids and hopefully these children are in school. There are a lot of other places where this can be delivered. For example, the foster care community is very vulnerable.
Of course, we are living in different times right now with what’s happening with immigration enforcement and all of the things the Trump administration is doing that are frightening people. Consequently, they won’t go get services, and they won’t go to a hospital. I don’t know if parents will put their kids in school, which would really be a shame. The way we reach unaccompanied minors or kids who are being trafficked across the border is, at some point, to reach them in school. If they don’t go to school, then our program is not going to reach them.
Although we do have a separate training program for anybody who is interesting in getting trained on how to deliver our curriculum, we can do that for a price. We’ve got teachers who are taking the training as well as people who run youth organizations, nurses, and other people who come into contact with some of these vulnerable kids.
Thibert: What about parents who home school their children? Will they also have access to this information?
Morris: Yes, home schooling is available, too. We have had parents reach out to us who wanted to get trained because they are homeschooling their children and other children as well. The training is available to anyone who finds out about it and wants to get the information.
Thibert: Over the past few years, the exploitation of children in sex and labor has become well-known, especially in movies and political circles. Why has this long-term issue just recently become recognized more often?
Morris: That’s actually problematic for us as well. When these movies come out, they don’t always address trafficking; instead, they sensationalize it. There was a movie called Taken that came out several years ago. I think there was a Taken 2. Those movies were really a problem for us because they reached the general public in a way that the work we are doing cannot, so through the media of television and film, you’re going to reach more people than publishing books. The problem that it caused for us it misrepresents how trafficking happens, and when people see movies like these, they don’t truly understand that this can happen to people that you know. In fact, labor trafficking and sex trafficking of minors typically happen in higher percentages with a person that you know and trust. So, the movies help with raising awareness about the issue, but they don’t necessarily portray it in a realistic way. That’s problematic. I’ve been doing this for 18 years, and I’ve seen more awareness about it. Awareness is great because it gets people activated. We, however, have chosen to focus on tangible actions that we can do that have tangible results. That’s why we focus on education.
Thibert: The One Million Abolitionists Project. Can you tell me more about this project?
Morris: This has been one of our most successful projects, or at least the project that has engaged people the most. It is the project for which we have received the most fundraising. The Frederick Douglass bicentennial was in 2018. We wanted to honor him by publishing a bicentennial edition of his first autobiography. Then we thought: How do we get the book into the hands of students? We came up with this idea called One Million Abolitionists as there was a service-learning curriculum for that project (no longer available).
The main idea was to get this book into one million hands however long it takes us to do that. During the initial project, I think we gave 50,000–70,000 books away quickly. The way we were able to give away these books was through grants from foundations, corporate sponsorships, individual donations—all of the same places where we get our other donors. We’ll have people who will say they want to fund a thousand books for their former high school, their alma mater. Lots of attorneys have done that. That’s the way we were able to get books out there. A couple of years ago, we wanted to reenergize the project. I believe that was in late 2021 or early 2022.
The publisher reached out to us after the History Channel aired a three-part Lincoln documentary in 2022. The History Channel wanted to support our project, so they gave us a $30,000 grant and then produced a commercial about the project that aired during the three-part miniseries. A publisher from Forefront Publishing saw that commercial and contacted us as they wanted to help us reach more students.
We signed a deal with Forefront Publishing and Simon & Schuster as distribution partners. We republished a Douglass Family Edition and that is the one that we are using right now. We’ve given away 110,000 copies of the book. We’re still a long way from a million and will keep working until we get there, hopefully with the support of your readers and other people. We’ve also given the books away internationally.
I wrote the foreword in that book and updated it because in 2022 I read that Edmond Public Schools in Oklahoma had banned it in their school districts. I was starting to hear about more book bans and they began to energize and ignite us to get this book into the hands of students, even if the book was being banned, anywhere that students gather: churches, organizations, and youth programs. How do we reach them? Where they gather. We get the books into their hands any way we can. I love this project! We just sent out 300 books to an organization in Philadelphia through my cousin Kevin Douglass Greene who is the great-great-grandson of Frederick Douglass. He does a lot of work in Philadelphia with organizations there.
Thibert: Another history-focused question. Booker T. Washington, in my opinion, is overlooked compared to Douglass. Why are his contributions not held as the same regard?
Morris: That points to awareness. Booker T’s legacy is Tuskegee University, and it’s hard to deny the impact he’s had on billions of people. He started Tuskegee in 1881 to educative formerly enslaved people. He was a trailblazer and way ahead of his time.
Whenever I go to schools to make a presentation, I talk equally about both of them. Because of the times we are living in now, Douglass naturally comes up just because of how much he’s given us and what he means to the struggle that we have today. Booker T. Washington is not as well-known, but again you can’t underestimate his impact on education. He was way ahead of his time. He was misunderstood during his time. He is still misunderstood today. I, being his descendant, have people who I come in contact with who revere him.
There are lots of people who know who he was, what his story was, and certainly many people know about Tuskegee. The higher percentage that I talk about Douglass now is more because you and I are talking mainly about him. It’s the nature in our society and how we are living right now.
Kenneth Morris Jr addressing a graduating class (photo credit: https://www.kennethbmorrisjr.com)
Thibert: Can you share any of the FDFI’s success stories that have touched you? What are some of the major accomplishments?
Morris: I’m proud of all of the work that we’ve done like the legislation and the impact it has had on primarily education prevention. I am proud of that. I’m proud of all of the projects. People ask all the time, “What is your legacy going to be?” I don’t really think about my legacy. I don’t believe my ancestors and many others, such as MLK and Rosa Parks, were really thinking about their legacies. Of course, we all want to be remembered in a positive light, but they just did the work that was in front of them. The work that needed to be done. We have the benefit of being able to look back at the work through the prism of history and to evaluate and point to their total work that they’ve done.
I kind of think of this in the same way. There is work in front of me that needs to be done and I just do it. Fortunately, we’re still small. I would describe us as a fledging nonprofit organization. People tend to give with an abundance of heart and not necessarily of thought. Our challenge in raising money for the work we’ve done continues, even when we’ve had significant grants available through private foundations. They want to know how many children they’ve rescued within a grant cycle because it makes them feel good to know that a child has been rescued. It doesn’t make people feel good to prevent this from happening and how do you measure prevention? It’s difficult. We’ve had difficulty raising money. A lot of organizations that started prevention education quickly gravitate towards the rescue and rehabilitation sides because that’s where the significant funding is coming from. That’s why we’ve had to be creative with projects like One Million Abolitionists and many other curriculum projects that we’ve done.
The thing that gives me the most inspiration and puts a smile on my face are the stories of the students who have been impacted, and I’m working on a book right now. I’m writing a memoir. Those stories are going to be in the book. It’s going to be the foundation of the book.
I’ll tell you a quick story.
When we started doing this work, I was presenting to a group of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders. There was a 10-year-old girl in that classroom who raised her hand, trying to get my attention. She’s bouncing up and down on her chair and waving her hand in the back of the room. I finally call on her and she says, “Mr. Morris, I want to tell you that I researched my family tree and I found out my great-great-great-great (four greats) grandmother was born into slavery, taught herself to read and write in secret, and ran away and became a successful businesswoman in our community and a philanthropist. She knew what that word meant. She was very proud of it. She asked, “Do you know what all of this means?” Before I had the chance to respond to her, she said, “It means that I have greatness flowing through my veins just like you.”
I have lots of stories just like that one. It makes me so proud to know that my ancestors are still impacting young people today. Frederick Douglass said, “It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Booker T. Washington said, “If you want to lift up yourself, lift up someone else.” Our projects are lifting students up in communities. Our projects are making stronger children, and when I hear comments like that, which happens all of the time, that’s what makes me most proud.
The other thing is when I run into adults now who were impacted, as I mentioned earlier, as students. To hear them say how this education has changed their lives and made them believe that they can be or say anything is possible. Because when you really look at Douglass and Washington’s stories, they were two boys born into slavery, and they both understood from an early age that education was going to be their pathway to freedom.
They literally had to steal their educations because it was illegal to teach them to read or write. We can look at their coming-of-age stories, although none of us can truly imagine or relate to what it would have been like to be enslaved, and be inspired.
I’m going to tell you one more story.
When my mother and I were both younger, we didn’t understand the emotional connection that many people had to our ancestors. It is impossible as a kid to understand that. I would see people come up to me and want to touch me and hug me many times with tears in their eyes. There would be old people with gray hair coming up and patting me on my hair and pinching my cheeks. It’s weird because I didn’t feel that I’d done anything to deserve that kind of attention. It wasn’t really until I started doing this work that people came up to me after I gave a talk, lecture, or presentation. Always with tears in their eyes, they said, “I read Frederick Douglass’s autobiography when I was in middle school, high school, or I read Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery when I was in college, and their stories made me believe that I could do anything and that I am in the leader that I am today because of the inspiration that I took away from their stories.
They are coming-of-age stories that anybody of any age, any race can relate to. We try to leverage that to make sure that more and more people, in particular young people, are being connected to the stories and impacted by them.
Thibert: What other programs or initiatives will the FDFI be launching over the next few years? Anything related to your “Underground Railroad Program” that you are participating in?
Morris: The next priority is the museum project. The Frederick Douglass Museum Center for Knowledge, Equality, and Justice is going to be an international world-class destination. Last year, I traveled to Ireland twice on Douglass-related events and speaking engagements. Over the past few years, I have been there seven or eight times.
He is big in Ireland. They have murals of him there. In the Republic of Ireland in Belfast, there is a statue of him and streets are named after him. Historical markers are all over the place. It’s the same in Scotland and England. In Newcastle upon Tyne, I traveled to Newcastle University in 2019 because they built a multi-million-pound building and named it for Frederick Douglass. Newcastle upon Tyne is where his abolitionist friends raised money to purchase his freedom for $711 or what was £150 back then.
The museum is a priority project. I just turned 63 a few days ago. I am thinking about slowing down, so this is a capstone project for me. The other work that I am doing right now is with my two daughters who are now 30 and 27 and my nephews who are around the same age and working with them. They are all going into their own careers. They are trying to do what I did at a later age.
We do another program called “Douglass Week.” This year, we will be in Boston in September and October. It’s the sixth annual event. We go back and forth from Europe and the United States. It’ just a week-long celebration with lectures, art, and music. Some of it is online and some of it is in person.
A couple of years ago one of the scholars interviewed my daughters and nephew. It was just a great conversation because the wheels are turning in their heads about how they can do this and make it their own.
We are also working on a museum at the Rochester Airport. The museum got a grant from the state of New York or rather the airport got the grant for $1.2 million to build out the observation deck into a mini-Douglass Museum so I’ve been working on that. We are supposed to unveil it July 1 and there is an audio-scape exhibit with excerpts of Douglass’s speeches so my daughters each read an excerpt and my nephew also read an excerpt as they start to engage more with this legacy as well.
Hopefully through this museum project and our organization, that will be a lasting legacy for our family.
Thibert: In conclusion, what is like being related to Dr. Umar Johnson?
Morris: Laughs.
His name actually does not come up often. The first time his name was brought up to me was several years ago when people would ask me about him. I don’t really spend a lot of time thinking about him these days. He’s quite a character.
That’s another thing in our family. We’ve had people over the years claim to be descendants. There was a guy out of Baltimore who called himself Frederick Douglass IV and he claimed to be the great-great-grandson of Frederick Douglass. He ran a scam for more than 25 years. That’s how long it took us to shut him down, but my mother, this is before we started the organization, would call me and be so upset about these Fake Freds.
When she first met him, it was at an event in Baltimore. He came up to her and introduced himself as a descendent of Frederick Douglass and she said, “Oh really?” Our family is small that we know who is in it and that this guy was not in our family. He introduces himself to my mom. She asks how they are related and most people can’t tell you. He says, “Oh, I’ll tell you later.” She says, “Well, can you at least tell me your name? He says, “I’m Frederick Douglass III. She says, “That’s interesting because my dad is Fredrick Douglass III and you’re not my dad.”
Of course, he avoided her the rest of the night. They ran into each other again a couple of years later now calling himself Fredrick Douglass IV. He had been invited to the White House under both President Bushes and President Clinton. My mom would be so upset, and I didn’t feel her pain because I was not locked into my lineage at that time. I feel bad now because I really did not pay attention to it.
Then I heard that Fake Fred was going to start manufacturing and selling Frederick Douglass What’s Dis Here BBQ Sauce and that got my attention. We started reaching out to black press and write a story about him. My wife learned about him and who he was. His name is Frederick Douglas, but it’s Frederick I. Douglas and he’s a Jr. We knew that he’s from Meadville, Pennsylvania, living in Baltimore, so we had all this information that we brought to several black outlets, but no one wanted to do the work on the story.
Finally, we got a writer at the Washington Post. Her name is Lynn Dukes, and she agreed to write the story and got an interview with him. He thought that he was being interviewed as the great-great-grandson and by this time he became so frustrated that my mom would not accept him into the family just because he said he’s in the family. He went to the Frederick Douglass National Historic site and tried to plug himself into our family tree. He has similar names in his family. He’s got Charles Douglas and Joseph Douglas. He went to the Frederick Douglass Beach House in Highland Beach and plugged himself into the family tree there. He was actively trying to do all this stuff. He was getting invited to give lectures for S5,000 a pop at Yale and other places. He was being hired over my mom because he was a male. He was quote, the namesake of Douglass, end quote. He was running a scam that a lot of people had fallen for. He had written introductions and forwards in people’s books. He was in introductions in people’s documentaries. He was a fraud. People were not doing their research and due diligence and we found out.
Lynn Dukes gets an interview, and by this time, he is so frustrated that he writes a three-page letter to my mom where he outlines how he is related. He says he’s related by Douglass through his son Douglass Jr. who had a son named Charles Douglass. All of that is true. Fredrick Douglass had seven children, one of whom was Charles. The problem with the story is that Charles died when he was 16, never having had children. We have all the documentary evidence. Since Frederick I. Douglas is not in the family, he did not know that.
This is where he slipped up. He put in writing how he is related. Lynn interviews him and prints up a family tree. She asks him before she interviews him, “I just received a package in the mail and it was a box of chicken wings and a box of What’s Dis Here BBQ Sauce?” She asked, “What’s dis here, indeed?” She interviews him and asks him where do you fit on the family tree and now, he has this new story. He points to the tree and tells her the story that I just told you, but she says, “That’s impossible because Charles died.” He cuts off the interview and a week later she got a letter from him with a new story claiming that my mom and I forced him to air his dirty secrets and laundry and he is forced to do it now. He was claiming that Frederick Jr. had an illegitimate son named Charles. That is false. There is no record of that. People were mad at us. After that article, it took another two years for him to go away.
Thibert: Did you try the sauce?
Morris: I didn’t try it, but I’m sure it is good. What I found amusing is the claim that one of the most eloquent men in the history of this country, you don’t have to say black or white, is going to use Ebonics and call it What’s Dis Here Sauce BBQ Sauce? An insult. Like my mother said, a relative of Frederick Douglass would have never done that.
Thibert: Mr. Morris, Thank you for making time to speak with me. I truly appreciate it.
