Photo By Todd Plitt, USA TODAY
By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY
April 8, 2011
Kenneth Morris says he realized his great-great-great-grandfather would not be the last abolitionist in the family when he discovered that slavery hadn’t ended with the Civil War.
A friend showed him a magazine article about how slavery in various forms around the world, including indentured servitude, forced labor and sex slavery, affected more people than in 1861.
It hit him: What better person to fight modern slavery than a descendant of Frederick Douglass? What better way to preserve Douglass’ memory?
Douglass, a slave who fled to freedom in the North in 1838, became the most influential black abolitionist of the 19th century. But to the young Ken Morris, he was the old man with “the wild white hair” and the fierce expression, glaring down from the painting on the wall. “It scared me,” recalls Morris, 48. “He looked mean.”
The Douglass link was played down by Morris’ parents, possibly because his own grandfather, who had struggled to live in the great man’s shadow, had committed suicide. “There’d been pressure on males in the family to be the next Frederick Douglass,” he says. As an adult, he turned down requests to speak or appear as a Douglass descendant. He raised his family in Riverside, Calif., established himself as a travel marketer, and disengaged from a legacy that, he says, “I took for granted.
There were stirrings. After seeing the TV series Roots, he says, “I wondered if I’d lived during that time, whether I would have been an abolitionist. I thought so, but I could never prove it.” Finally, when he saw the article about modern slavery, “I couldn’t walk away.”
He phased out his marketing career and joined his mother, Nettie, in 2007 to found the Frederick Douglass Family Foundation, which goes into schools seeking to create “modern abolitionists” to fight global slavery.
Morris says he’s as motivated by his two teenage daughters as his famous ancestor: “When I found out young girls were in brothels in Asia forced to be sex slaves, how could I do nothing and look my daughters in the eye? I had this platform my ancestor built through struggle and sacrifice. To not do something would have been a crime.”
