Story Created: Feb 9, 2011 at 10:43 PM PST

Being related to both Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington might cause most people to feel as if they exist in a pressure cooker of history, but not 48-year-old Kenneth B. Morris, Jr.

The great-great-great grandson of Douglass and great-great grandson of Washington — Morris’ grandfather Frederick Douglass III was Frederick Douglass’ great-grandson; his grandmother, Nettie Hancock Washington, was Booker T. Washington’s granddaughter. The two met at Tuskegee Institute in 1940 and married three months later — Morris said he led a happy life as a father, husband and manager of a successful marketing firm, but was disengaged from his lineage for most of his life, though he was made aware of it as early as 4 years old.

One reason was due to the effects such pressure of carrying on the name had on his grandfather, Frederick Douglass III.

“He had this weight of expectations on his shoulders. He was the namesake of one of this country’s greatest heroes,” Morris said after speaking Feb. 4 at a Black History Month event sponsored by Southern California Edison honoring African-American inventors, leaders and businesses. “When my grandmother was seven months pregnant with my mom, he took his own life. So, when I was born with the dual lineage, my grandmother, mother and father didn’t push it on me.”

But things changed one fateful day in 2007 when a friend handed him a National Geographic magazine featuring an extensive article on modern-day slavery: Human trafficking.

“I thought, ‘Slavery doesn’t exist, it ended with the Emancipation Proclamation and the work of Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists,’” said the Washington, D.C. native. “But as I started to do my research I found that there were an estimated 27 million people around the world living in conditions as horrific as those that my ancestors endured — 80 percent are women and 50 percent are children.”

The only difference, according to Morris, is that one was done in the open, while the other occurs in the shadows. And as the father of two young daughters, “I could not look my girls in the eyes and walk away from this,” he said, adding that he was in shock when he found that young girls were working in brothels and that children were forced into labor.

Reading the magazine, Morris said, brought back memories of Alex Haley’s “Roots,” which he watched as a child, envisioning himself as the Frederick Douglass of that time, where he wouldn’t sit back and allow such injustices to occur.

“I could never prove that to myself because you are talking about crimes of the past,” he said. “Now all of a sudden here I [was] faced with a present-day crime and I just couldn’t walk away from it.”

That same year, he and his mother, Nettie Washington Douglass, founded the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation. The nonprofit is designed to preserve the legacy of the man referred to as the “father of the civil rights movement” and create awareness about 21st century slavery.

“The fact is that we all live far from the cotton fields,” Morris said. “The echoes of slavery are hard to hear from where we stand, but if we all listen close enough we would hear cries and not echoes from the slaves of today. We will hear cries not echoes from our young people who need inspiration and hope. When we listen to that, that’s when we change what will happen.”

Now Morris acts as a public speaker — in addition to serving on the Booker T. Washington Family Committee and the Africa Global Partnership — reaching more than 50,000 middle, high school and college students through service learning programs, where he gives lectures on his family history, draws the link between modern-day slavery and that of the past, then encourages them to become leaders.

“We need to know where we came from in order to know where we are going,” he said. “I truly believe that our young people who are in trouble, who feel they don’t have any hope, when they are forming their identities, if they knew that they descended from great people that made a difference, that they descended from people who fought and died just for their right to sit in a classroom and get an education, and that they stand on the shoulders of those that came before them, I truly believe that if they had this information they would have more respect for themselves. They would have more respect for their peers and they certainly wouldn’t be disrespecting those that came before them.”

Having once had the opportunity to try on shoes once owned by Douglass, Morris declined — despite desperately wanting to — “because I knew that they wouldn’t fit. Those shoes are too big for any of us to fit in,” he said. “But I realized that I can take the shoes that I’ve got, and you all can take the shoes that you’ve got, and we can lead the way to a brighter future.”