Professor Dale Green explains the importance of the African American churches on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Baltimore on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay for Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass.
The Hill in Easton, Maryland lends clues to the rich religious heritage and culture of free persons of color, hirelings (who lent themselves out) and enslaved persons during the time of the American Revolution and into the 19th Century. Frederick Douglass, born a slave, and his future wife, Anna Murray, born free, were born on opposite shores of the Tuckahoe River. They met in Baltimore.
Forty years later, Frederick comes back to Easton to dedicate two churches, the Asbury Methodist and the Bethel AME Church, both still standing today on The Hill where anthropological finds include a bundle, also known as a wheel in reference to the Prophet Ezekiel. Professor Dale Green of Morgan State university, a descendant of Harriet Tubman, the great freedom fighter, and Frederick Douglass, the great 19th Century emancipation fighter, shares his family history and the historiography of one of the oldest American free black communities on Carlisle's Chesapeake.