Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives

What is FDFI

Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives (FDFI) is an Abolitionist and Antiracist organization founded by direct descendants of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. Our mission is To Advance Freedom through Knowledge and Strategic Action. Since 2007, FDFI has been a leader in implementing innovative human trafficking prevention education curricula in classrooms nationally. In 2019, FDFI moved its headquarters to Rochester, NY to join the fight for racial equity through collaboration, agitation and by leveraging the spirit of Frederick Douglass.

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FDFI Major Initiatives

FDFI partnered in developing an ongoing human trafficking prevention education program called PROTECT with two California non-profit organizations: 3Strands Global and Love Never Fails. PROTECT is the largest and most comprehensive program of its kind including, Response Protocol, Professional Development, Curriculum and Data Analysis. FDFI successfully advised on reauthorizing federal legislation, the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention & Protection Act. Now, FDFI is addressing racism in Douglass’s adopted home of Rochester.

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Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was one of the foremost leaders of the abolitionist movement, which fought to end slavery within the United States in the decades prior to the Civil War. A brilliant speaker, Douglass was asked by the American Anti-Slavery Society to engage in a tour of lectures, and so became recognized as one of America’s first great black speakers. He won world fame when his autobiography was publicized in 1845. Two years later he began publishing an antislavery paper called the North Star.

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Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington recalled his childhood in his autobiography, Up From Slavery. He was born in 1856 on the Burroughs tobacco farm which, despite its small size, he always referred to as a “plantation.” His mother was a cook, his father a white man from a nearby farm. “The early years of my life, which were spent in the little cabin," he wrote, “were not very different from those of other slaves.” He went to school in Franklin County – not as a student, but to carry books for one of James Burroughs’s daughters. It was illegal to educate slaves.

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