2A ❚ FRIDAY, JULY 10, 2020 ❚ USA TODAY
THE BACKSTORY
We need to honor Anna Murray Douglass, too
Nicole Carroll
Editor-in-chief
USA TODAY
Her name was Anna Murray
Douglass. One of 12 children, her
parents were enslaved on
Maryland’s Eastern Shore. She left
home at 17 to work as a domestic
helper. She saved enough money
to help her fiance, Frederick,
escape slavery and start a new
life.
We were discussing the immense
work and legacy of Frederick Douglass
at our morning news meeting this week
when editor Anika Reed spoke up about
the lesser-known Anna Murray Doug-
lass.
Frederick’s wife of 44 years doesn’t
get enough credit for making his accom-
plishments possible, Reed said.
She’s absolutely right.
The social chatter about Anna grew
over the holiday weekend when we re-
membered her husband’s famous
speech of July 5, 1852,“What to the Slave
is the Fourth of July?” But this is a con-
versation that started at least as far
back as 1900, when their daughter Ro-
setta Douglass Sprague delivered a
speech about Anna that later became
the paper, “My Mother as I Recall Her.”
“Her courage, her sympathy at the
start was the mainspring that support-
ed the career of Frederick Douglass,”
Sprague wrote. “As is the condition of
most wives her identity became so
merged with that of her husband, that
few of their earlier friends in the North
really knew and appreciated the full val-
ue of the woman who presided over the
Douglass home for forty-four years.”
Anna was born in rural Maryland
around 1813. She was the eighth of 12
children, Sprague wrote, the first of her
siblings born after her parents became
Vehicular ‘terrorism’ escalates: 19 attacks since May
Grace Hauck
USA TODAY
People running, screaming and
shouting words of disbelief. Bodies
thrown in the air, lifted onto wind-
shields or trapped under cars and semi-
trucks. It’s become a horrifying and fa-
miliar scene in recent weeks.
Amid thousands of protests nation-
wide against police brutality, dozens of
drivers have plowed into crowds of pro-
testers marching in roadways.
Witnesses, law enforcement and ter-
rorism experts said some of the vehicle
incidents appear to be targeted and po-
litically motivated; others appear to be
situations in which the driver became
frightened or enraged by protesters sur-
rounding their vehicle.
“There are groups that do want peo-
ple to take their cars and drive them into
Black Lives Matters protesters so that
they won’t protest anymore. There’s an
element of terrorism there. Is it all of
them? No,” said J.J. MacNab, a fellow at
George Washington University’s Pro-
gram on Extremism. “I look at it as an
anti-protester group of acts, some of
which are white supremacist, some
not.”
There have been at least 66 incidents
of cars driving into protesters from May
27 to July 6, including 59 by civilians
and seven by law enforcement, accord-
ing to Ari Weil, a terrorism researcher at
the University of Chicago’s Project on
Security and Threats. Weil began track-
ing the incidents as protests sprung up
in the wake of George Floyd’s death in
police custody.
There have been two fatalities – in
Seattle and in Bakersfield, California –
and at least 24 of the civilian cases have
been charged by law enforcement, Weil
said.
At least 19 incidents malicious
Many of the incidents were captured
in photos or videos shared on social
media: Two New York police vehicles
plowed into demonstrators as the crowd
pushed a barricade against one of them;
a woman in a black SUV drove through a
crowd in Denver; a Detroit police vehicle
accelerated away with a man flailing on
the hood.
This week, drivers struck protesters
in Bloomington, Indiana, and Hunting-
ton Station, New York. Similar scenes
played out in Los Angeles, Boston, Tul-
Anna Murray Douglass was the first
wife of writer and abolitionist
Frederick Douglass. FILE
free.
She met Frederick Bailey, who was
still enslaved, in Baltimore. He had been
hired out to work there. He too was from
Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Anna saved
enough money to help Frederick escape
to New York, wearing a sailor’s uniform
she sewed for a disguise. They were
married, changed their name to Doug-
lass and moved to New Bedford, Massa-
chusetts, where they began their aboli-
tionist work.
Frederick was often gone for long
periods of time, Sprague
recounted: “It was then that
mother with four children, the
eldest in her sixth year, struggled
to maintain the family amid much
that would dampen the courage of
many a young woman of to-day.”
It was also dangerous, as Frederick
had escaped slavery and Anna had
helped him. They could be pursued at
any time.
Anna helped support the family by
binding shoes and taking in laundry.
Sprague wrote that her father ad-
Emergency workers tend to an injured
person after a driver sped through a
protest-related closure on the
Interstate 5 freeway in Seattle on July
4. Dawit Kelete, 27, was charged with
vehicular assault. JAMES ANDERSON VIA AP
sa, Oklahoma, Tallahassee, Florida, and
San Jose, California.
Weil said that by analyzing news cov-
erage, court documents and patterns of
behavior – such as when people alleged-
ly yelled slurs at protesters or turned
around for a second hit – he determined
that at least 19 of the 59 civilian inci-
dents were malicious and four were not.
Weil said he did not have enough infor-
mation to classify the motives of the re-
maining 36 incidents.
One of the more “clear-cut” cases of
malice, MacNab said, was in early June
in Lakeside, Virginia. An “avowed
Klansman” drove up to protesters on a
roadway, revved his engine, then drove
through the crowd, wounding one per-
son, Henrico County Commonwealth’s
Attorney Shannon Taylor said in a state-
ment.
The 36-year-old man was “a propa-
gandist of Confederate ideology,” Taylor
said. He was charged with four counts
of assault with hate crimes, two counts
of felonious attempted malicious
wounding and one count of felony hit
and run.
“We lived through this in Virginia in
Charlottesville in 2017,” Taylor said, re-
ferring to when a neo-Nazi plowed his
car through a crowd of counterprotes-
ters at a Unite the Right rally, killing
Heather Heyer. The driver was sen-
tenced to life in prison on hate crime
charges.
Last month in Visalia, California, oc-
cupants of a Jeep displaying a “Keep
America Great” flag hit two protesters in
the road, causing minor injuries, ac-
mired her mother’s financial manage-
ment: “During his absence abroad, he
sent, as he could, support for his family,
and on his coming home he supposed
there would be some bills to settle.” But
when he would return, Anna would
show him the bank book with his earn-
ings deposited as well as hers. There
were no debts.
The family eventually settled in
Rochester, New York, where Frederick
ran the North Star, an anti-slavery
newspaper, and continued his travels.
Anna’s house was busy, hosting guests
in the anti-slavery movement and help-
ing at least 100 others seeking freedom
on the Underground Railroad.
David Blight won the 2019 Pulitzer
Prize for History for his book,
“Frederick Douglass: Prophet of
Freedom.” He says Anna “was
more than a helpmate. She was
the person who kept the home
alive.”
“Of course she deserves credit,”
Blight says, “tremendous credit, making
possible his constant travel, making it
possible for him to go on the road and
make a living as best he could.”
So why don’t we know more about
her? “It’s the silence of Anna,” he says.
She didn’t read or write, so there are no
letters to her or by her. What we know,
we know mainly from remembrances of
her children.
Anna and Frederick grew up three
miles from each other, Blight says.
When they met in Baltimore as young
adults, he imagines but can’t prove that
“they must’ve just smiled and started
talking about mutual cousins, where
they grew up, and ‘did you know so and
so.’ They had a lot in common.”
Anna helped Frederick escape to
New York, and followed a week later.
“She was just as brave as he was to make
that journey,” Blight says.
Over time, as Frederick developed his
career as a preeminent writer, speaker
cording to Visalia police. Witnesses said
those inside the car mocked protesters
by cupping their ears as if they couldn’t
hear their chants. The protesters started
chanting profanities and throwing
items before they approached the Jeep,
which accelerated, hitting the protes-
ters before driving off.
County prosecutors didn’t charge the
driver Wednesday, saying the protesters
involved weren’t “seriously injured” and
the driver and his passengers felt
threatened. Other civilians and police
officers have similarly claimed that they
drove through protesters because they
were afraid of them and wanted to es-
cape the situation.
MacNab noted that “some of that fear
is going to come from racism and bigot-
ry.”
Videos become a meme
Officials in Minnesota said last
month that a 35-year-old semitruck
driver who drove through a crowd of
thousands of protesters on a bridge did
not deliberately target the group. A law-
yer for a man who hit two protesters in
Seattle, killing one, said the crash was a
“horrible, horrible accident.” Prosecu-
tors filed three felony charges against
the man Wednesday.
Video of many of the vehicle ram-
mings has circulated on social media,
including white supremacist websites,
according to MacNab, who said she has
seen “revolting” commentary on videos
shared to white supremacist accounts
on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
“This has become something of a
meme in white supremacy circles. The-
re’ll be a picture of a car driving into a
crowd, and then there will be a humor-
ous remark about it. It’s definitely part
of the discourse,” said Daniel Byman, a
senior fellow at Brookings who re-
searches counterterrorism and Middle
East security. “They’re doing a lot of kid-
ding-not-kidding sort of humor ...
which is the modern white supremacist
world.”
Byman said he’s seen a meme shared
by the Charlottesville killer circulating
in white supremacist circles. Right-
wing extremists turned the man into “a
bit of a saint” after the killing, MacNab
said.
‘ISIS made it a science’
Vehicles have been used as tools of
NEWS
and newspaper editor, Anna managed
the home.
“She had to establish herself, fight for
her own kind of space, no doubt,” Blight
says. “She had to gain respect and the
way she could was by running that
household. And his many, many ab-
sences, no doubt that had to have been a
great struggle for her.”
She was very private, he says, but
was known for her garden and her
“Maryland biscuits.”
Anne raised five children. Her young-
est and namesake, Annie, died just be-
fore her 11th birthday. She would have 21
grandchildren, Blight said, many of
whom died early as well.
“In her own right, if we could ever get
even closer to Anna,” he says, “this must
have been a very substantive woman.”
When Reed saw the social media
discussion about Anna, she
started racking her brain. “Did I
know about her?” she wondered.
She felt “almost embarrassed”
that she didn’t.
“To have this Black woman serve as
such a major support system, and the
vehicle for him to be the leader he be-
came, it was fascinating that her story
isn’t more told, but not surprising, un-
fortunately,” Reed said.
She pointed out that we still see
women, Black women in particular, and
people from marginalized communities
be hidden from history.
“But it’s something we (as journal-
ists) have the opportunity to fix,” she
said.
“There is always more to the story.”
There is certainly more to the Freder-
ick Douglass story.
Her name was Anna Murray Doug-
lass.
Thank you for supporting our jour-
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Backstory.
terror for decades, but it’s become more
common in the past 10 years, experts
said. The Islamic State disseminated in-
formation about how to use the tactic,
said Lorenzo Vidino, director of George
Washington University’s Program on
Extremism.
“Between 2014 and 2017, we saw sev-
eral attacks, and ISIS was very meticu-
lous in a variety of languages that gave
clear instructions about what trucks to
use, how to rent a truck and how to hit a
group,” Vidino said. “ISIS made it a sci-
ence.”
Most of those attacks were in Europe
and the Middle East, Vidino said. Ter-
rorists influenced by the Islamic State
used vehicles to kill people in Nice,
France, in 2016 and on London Bridge in
2017. That year, a man influenced by the
Islamic State killed eight people when
he drove a pickup about 1 mile in Lower
Manhattan.
Other extremist groups borrowed the
tactic, Vidino said. In 2018, a member of
a misogynist online subculture drove a
van into downtown Toronto, killing 10
people.
The vehicular attacks have been “the
trademark of the affiliated wannabes
that are at times extremely deadly,” he
said.
The tactic is cheap and doesn’t take
much coordination or organizational
support. It’s also “camera-friendly,” Vi-
dino said.
“The Charlottesville attack, it killed
one person, but it stuck in everybody’s
mind because you have the spectacle of
bodies flying. It’s catchy. And that’s
what a lot of extremists pursue. It ter-
rorized people,” he said.
In the USA, the tactic was introduced
by the far-right around 2016 to attack
Black Lives Matter protests and demon-
strations against the Dakota Access
Pipeline, Weil said in a Twitter thread.
That’s when “the right began creating
memes to celebrate” the attacks, he
said.
“I would be very careful in the middle
of the street,” MacNab said. “There’s a
significant amount of people who think
that any protester hit in the street has it
coming, and that’s a dangerous mind-
set.”
Contributing: Elinor Aspegren, USA
TODAY; Ernest Rollins and Emily Erns-
berger, The Herald-Times (Bloomington,
Indiana); Emily Mavrakis, Gainesville-
.com; Sheyanne N. Romero and Kyra
Haas, Visalia (California) Times-Delta