Local author Tom Dalton spoke with the Swampscott Middle School book club Thursday about his book and research into Frederick Douglass’ time on the North Shore.

Douglass was an abolitionist, writer and orator. He was one of the most prominent figures in the 19th-century African American civil rights movement. Dalton, who is a retired Lynn Daily Item reporter, started writing about Douglass in 1990 in hopes of informing readers about the abolitionist’s connection to Lynn, which included the area of Swampscott at the time. Dalton wrote “Frederick Douglass: The Lynn Years.”

In July, the community gathered at the Swampscott Town Hall Lawn to read and discuss Frederick Douglass’ 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

“At one point, the most famous Black person in the world was living here, in these neighborhoods,” Dalton said. “I think he’s part of the incredible stories in history.”

After escaping from slavery in Maryland in 1838, Douglass became known as a leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York. He wrote three autobiographies, and he actively campaigned for the rights of freed slaves as well as for women’s suffrage. 

“He speaks at churches. He becomes a lay preacher and he hosts meetings on anti-slavery,” Dalton said. “Somebody hears him speak and they say ‘I’m from the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. We want to hire you to work with us.’”

Douglass arrived in Lynn at age 23 in 1841 and lived there for six years, during which he wrote his influential autobiography, “The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass.”

“He traveled all around,” Dalton said. “When he traveled, they wouldn’t allow Black people to sit inside, so he’d have to sit on top of a train, same thing on a boat. There was rain, cold weather. People called him names and yelled at him, and at one point, people tackled him and he was beaten. It was a very hard life, but he kept going because he believed so strongly that he could do something to end slavery.”

Some critics called Douglass “a complete phony,” Dalton said, doubting that someone without formal education could speak and write so powerfully. In part to prove his authenticity, Douglass wrote his autobiography “to tell you who I really am,” Dalton said.

“It’s so well written, it’s hard to believe it’s a man who never went to school and learned everything on his own,” Dalton said. “What really moved me was his mother, her name was Harriet Bailey and she has this little baby but she can’t stay with him and they just send her back to another plantation to work 12 miles away, so he’s left up in the woods in a cabin. There was a grandmother, a great person, and for six years she raised him. But his mother, sometimes at night, when she finished her work she’d walk in the dark several miles to see him.”

Dalton also shared how Douglass advised then-President Abraham Lincoln as well as supported the campaigns of future Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes. 

But Douglass’ time in the area is often not told in stories. Dalton said Douglass’ years in Lynn are often overlooked because he spent much of that time traveling for work.

“They wouldn’t write about it,” Dalton said. “I figured out that when he came here, he lived here for six years, but he left with this job where he was traveling, so for about four of those years he actually was away traveling all over the place.”

Douglass’ wife, Anna, and their four children remained in Lynn during those years.

On one of his travels, Dalton recalled, Douglass sat on the train with “all these white abolitionists and the conductor came along and said ‘No, what are you doing sitting here?’” Frederick asked for one “good reason” to move, to which the conductor pointed to his race. 

“He wouldn’t move,” Dalton said. “The conductor yelled outside for men who were working on the railroad and five or six men came in and they started hitting Douglass and they tried to pick him up…Frederick Douglass was incredibly strong so they couldn’t budge him. So with all their might, they pulled and pulled and then – the benches on the train were wooden – they snapped that right off the floor and took the wooden bench with Douglass on it and another man on it, carried it down, opened the doro and threw them out.”

Today, the spot where Douglass would have landed from the train – as well as his house which no longer is standing – would be around the Frederick Douglass Memorial Park in Lynn, Dalton said. 

“He would’ve walked by that park a thousand times,” Dalton said. “He was so remarkable to overcome so many odds, doing everything against him but he kept pushing, pushing and pushing.”