These testimonials were kindly written in response to this resource in 2021.
'I was very pleased to loan my Anna Murray and Frederick Douglass Family Collection to the National Library of Scotland. I have very fond memories of my times in Edinburgh and was delighted that the first public exhibition of the collection was in Scotland, a country that was so very important to Frederick Douglass. Scotland played a crucial role in Douglass’s life, placing him on an international stage and helping to forge his word-renowned activism as an antislavery freedom-fighter and social justice campaigner as well as an inspirational author, orator, and philosopher. I am impressed with the Struggles for Liberty online learning resource, complete with its wide variety of historic materials and curriculum-specific learning activities. I understand the importance of access to source materials and believe that Struggles for Liberty will serve as an indispensable and easily accessible resource for students, teachers, and for those looking to learn more about the Douglass family and other 19th-century African American freedom fighters.'
Dr. Walter O. Evans, Walter O. and Linda Evans Foundation, Savanah, Georgia
'I support this educational “source” of history because, education, freedom and the life of Frederick Douglass go together. Douglass (1818-1889) was born a chattel slave in Maryland, USA. According to the great minds of the Enlightenment such as those of David Hume (1753) and Immanuel Kant (1777), negroes (black people) were “inferior to whites” and were an inferior race. This prejudgement was used to justify the enslavement of black people in the New World. Douglass’ life showed that this racist prejudgement was wrong, not right. His life took him from slavery to become an anti-slavery campaigner, orator, essayist, author, human rights activist, abolitionist, husband, father, philosopher, intellectual, preacher, historian, statesman and defender of our common humanity. If Hume and Kant were correct, Douglass’ life would not have been possible. His life should be studied and appreciated because it says that we are one humanity, nothing less. I am thankful to Douglass for reminding us all that, “It is easier to build strong children than repair broken men”. My late dear mother of the Windrush Generation, used Douglass’ advice to educate me.'
'The Struggle for Liberty: African American Revolutionaries in the Atlantic World, is an extraordinary resource about the African American fight for freedom. It migrates across the United States and the British Isles, documenting the collective struggle throughout the African Diaspora. The visual resources and written documents, as well as interactive maps, likewise highlight the central theme of family. Anna Murray Douglass, a free woman and activist in her own right, was the cement that held the Douglass family together. International in scope, this learning resource is an invaluable record of the freedom narrative that permeated the Atlantic world during the long nineteenth century.'
‘What a timely resource. Our stories of liberation here in the United States have been so completely sanitized that there is little understood about how a window into our past can help disarm the tyrants of the present. Historians have a tendency to lionize figures and in so doing often eliminate the critical networks and shared experiences of others who helped support, advance, and sustain the struggle.
Clearly, this exceptional resource is the type of vehicle needed to challenge the immorality and inhumanity towards mankind practiced presently in the United States and around the world that espouse a diversity and inclusive narrative but move steadily away from true equity.
This golden resource enables crusaders for justice and liberation in our global community to learn about a shared humanity as evidenced in these histories, narratives, speeches, etc. By so doing they can envision what allyship might look like from an international and intersectional perspective.
To paraphrase Angela Davis, "It is in this collectivity that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism."
This resource enables us to liberate minds and provides the fuel for igniting the fire needed to create the kind of connectivity necessary to build a critical mass of truthtellers and liberators.’
'Struggles for Liberty is an indispensable archive of the Black liberation tradition. It offers freedom loving people all around the world access to a treasure trove of original images and documents that demonstrate and illustrate the resourcefulness, resilience, and resolve forged by freedom fighters through centuries of struggle. It is a people’s archive carefully curated to expose the meanness and mendacity of white supremacy and to equip those oppressed by it with needed resources for the construction of a decent and democratic future.'