When African Americans were finally given the same rights as whites. In Hayden's first line he says, “When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty” these rights have apparently not yet been granted to African Americans, but are desired. Most of Hayden's poetry is an homage to Fredrick Douglass himself because he was one of the major influences in starting the debate in America to make African Americans equal to whites. Douglass was one of the leading abolitionists during the nineteenth century, and his acts then led to the freedom that African Americans had in the first half of the twentieth century, although in this poem Hayden makes us question whether it was truly freedom or not. In “Frederick Douglass,” Robert Hayden expresses the request to notice the need to