Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedon by David Blight

Frederick Douglass was a remarkable man who lived an equally remarkable life.  As a child he had a few pieces of luck, which did no spare him from knowing first hand the life of a field slave in the Deep South, but did allow him to be able to live to tell the tale and write about it.
Douglass spent most of his adolescence in a house in Baltimore, where the mistress allowed him to play with her son and who taught him to read and write.  Those were huge advantages that he could have easily missed out on.  Then there was the fact that he worked in a shipyard, so he knew the city, the ways of free men, and he had a skill.  So when he escaped as a young man and started his life as an abolitionist and an orator , he was equipped to do so.
The book covers Douglass' entire life, which was long and occasionally controversial, but the long standing take away message is that by his first hand accounting of slavery and the legacy of men owning men, is the uncovering of deeply sadistic traits in this way of thinking that survives in the modern American experience.  It is not just the need to feel superior, but also the need to inflict pain and then to derive pleasure from it that makes white supremacists so loathsome.  Douglass witnessed the continuation of that far beyond the Civil War, and Blight writes about it with balance.