More than 175 years after Frederick Douglass embarked on a four-month visit to Ireland, the first all-island symposium to mark the occasion takes place this week.
âDouglass Weekâ is a seven-day series of events celebrating the trip he described as âtransformativeâ.
Douglass was one of the most powerful voices in the anti-slavery movement in the United States in the 19th century, escaping slavery while a young man and becoming a prominent abolitionist, orator and writer.
In 1845 he travelled to Ireland â then in the early days of the Great Famine â visiting Belfast, Dublin and Cork, before leaving to tour Britain.
He spoke to packed audiences, many of them Quakers, about the movement to abolish slavery in the US, at one point sharing a stage with Daniel OâConnell. Douglass was hugely impressed by OâConnell, a vocal opponent of slavery even when some figures in Irish America advised against it.