Some people inherit mentors they can call on the phone. Mine has been dead for 130 years.

For nearly two decades, through every season of building an independent Christian media ministry that sometimes felt too heavy to carry, I found myself returning to Frederick Douglass.

I’ve done this not simply to admire him, though I do, but to remember what faithfulness to a vision looks like.

I gaze at this giant of a historical figure to remind myself that this road has been walked before by someone who had far less than I have and built something the Library of Congress now holds in more than 575 digitized issues.

In 2019, a traumatic brain injury took portions of what I once knew. Parts of my scholarly life, things I had read and studied and inhabited over decades, went dark.

But the lingering memory of Frederick Douglass did not fade. He, somehow, was still there.

I take that as something more than coincidence.

This July, Empowering Everyday Women Online Magazine entered its 19th year. In November, I turn 50. The publication’s 20th anniversary is just over the horizon. As I inch closer to these new milestones, I continue going back to the same man, the same story, the same desk in Rochester, New York.

Rochester sits just east of where I live in Western New York, along the same Erie Canal corridor Douglass's generation traveled. From that desk, a formerly enslaved man with no formal education and considerable debt decided that the truth required a vehicle. Therefore, he would build one himself.

The North Star first appeared on December 3, 1847. Douglass had spent two years touring Britain, Ireland, and Scotland to raise the startup funds.

He relocated his family to Rochester over the pointed objections of his mentor, the prominent white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison believed a Black-owned independent press was unnecessary and would fracture the movement. Douglass heard all of the objections and forged ahead anyway.

The paper was four pages, published weekly, and sold for $2 per year. Publishing costs ran approximately $80 per week, more than subscription revenue could reliably cover. Within the first year, Douglass mortgaged his home to keep the press running. He returned to the lecture circuit on top of his editorial duties to close the gap. He ran the paper while corresponding with readers on two continents and raising a family. Through all of it, he remained one of the most recognizable figures in the American abolitionist movement.

He would not be talked out of it, bought out of it, or worn out of it.

Across the masthead, Douglass printed a motto that was profound, that mixed theology with the politics of the day. It declared that “right is of no sex—truth is of no color— and God is the Father of us all, and all we are bretheren.”

How fascinating that a newspaper was launched by a preacher.

After his escape from slavery in September 1838, by June 1839, Douglass had become a licensed minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The oratorical gifts he developed in that congregation were the same gifts that reverberated through the lecture halls of two continents.

He drew a line in print that every Christian journalist since has had to reckon with. In the appendix to his Narrative, Douglass wrote: "I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land."

He was defending the faith from the inside, the way a prophet defends truth against those who distort it. He distinguished the Christianity of Christ from the religion being used to sanction human bondage, and he did it with the confidence of someone who had read the Book and understood the difference. Near the end of his life, he anchored his final public hope in "the broad foundation laid by the Bible itself, that God has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth."

The Word governed him from first to last.

The North Star was no single-issue broadsheet. Douglass covered the California Gold Rush and the French constitution. He published excerpts from Charles Dickens's novels. He carried the speeches of Harriet Jacobs, who had escaped slavery herself and whose voice belonged in print. The paper ran book reviews, international correspondence, poetry, and practical counsel for free Black communities navigating civic life.

When the first Women's Rights Convention gathered at Seneca Falls in July 1848, Douglass attended. He was the only man present to rise and vote in favor of the Declaration of Sentiments demanding equality for women. His paper covered the convention, and the printed materials were produced at The North Star office.

He covered everything because he understood that the liberation of his people connected to everything. He refused to be assigned a lane. He was a Christian minister, a Black man, a writer, an editor, an intellectual, a political theorist, and a social critic. He would not lay one of those down to fit the categories created by people who had already decided what he was supposed to be.

By 1851, financial pressure forced a merger with Gerrit Smith's Liberty Party Paper, and the publication became Frederick Douglass' Paper. Though the name changed, the voice did not. He remained editor.

Then, the formal break with Garrison followed. Douglass had concluded that the Constitution was a liberty document and that political engagement was the path to emancipation. He continued publishing through Douglass' Monthly and eventually the New National Era in Washington, D.C., running through 1874.

He published continuously for more than 16 years, across three titles, outlasting the Civil War, Reconstruction, and every prediction that he could not sustain it.

I started EEW Magazine in 2007, from a kitchen table in Delaware, where my husband and I had relocated for his work at a Philadelphia institution. I have been ordained and preaching since I was eleven years old.

This work is not something I chose because it seemed viable. It is something I was called to before I knew what it would cost.

There have been years when the weight of running an independent faith media operation felt unsustainable. Douglass answered those years in his own words at The North Star's founding: "Justice must be done, the truth must be told. I will not be silent."

Media, in this context, is a calling, not an option.

He proved that a Bible-believing, Scripture-grounded Black Christian could also be a first-rate journalist, a political mind, a social critic, an intellectual, and a builder of institutions that outlast their builder. He carried both his faith and his full intellectual force at full height, without apology. That mixture of faith and intellect is evident across the body of work he left behind.

Frederick Douglass reinforced for me that Christians can be all those things at the same time. I have believed it my whole life. I have tried to build something that demonstrates it.

I want the young African American women and men who feel the same pull toward this work to know they belong to a long tradition. It is a tradition that has always insisted faith and intellect belong together. A tradition that has made room, from its earliest days, for the full range of what a Black Christian voice can say and do and build.

Nineteen years from a kitchen table. One hundred and seventy-eight years from a press in Rochester.

While the machinery has changed, the calling has not.

Frederick Douglass’s North Star no longer exists in its original form. Yet we still find our way by it.

The complete archive of Frederick Douglass's newspapers, 1847 to 1874, is digitized and freely available through the Library of Congress Digital Collections. The first issue of The North Star, dated December 3, 1847, is among the holdings.

Dianna Hobbs is the founder and CEO of Empowering Everyday Women Ministries, Inc. and EEW Magazine Online. She is a licensed Evangelist Missionary and the writer of Your Daily Cup of Inspiration, a top-rated blog for Christian women.